[issue15502] Meta path finders and path entry finders are different, but share an ABC

[Barry A. Warsaw]

Barry A. Warsaw added the comment:

On Aug 01, 2012, at 10:44 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

>The problem with "path importer" is it's just plain *wrong*. That object is
>not an importer and thus calling it one makes it much harder to learn the
>finder/loader/importer distinctions correctly.

The term "importer" is sufficiently squishy though, and I think we could just
as easily adjust the term's definition in the glossary to match what this
thing is.

>"import finder" is only slightly longer than "importer" and has the huge
>advantage of *not being wrong*.

The problem is that "import finder" isn't correct either, because this thing
doesn't load modules, and it doesn't find imports.  It finds loaders through
different kinds of finders.

It is unquestionably a finder, so probably the most accurate term would be
"path finder" but that just didn't read well when I tried to use it.  Part of
the problem is that "path finder" isn't different enough from "path entry
finder" to avoid confusion, and I really like the latter to describe the
things that the sys.path_hooks callables return, and I'm sure none of us want
to call it the "path entry loader finder finder" :).

Keep trying, but so far "path importer" is the least crappy of the lot, IMHO.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue15502>
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