[Python-Dev] 1.6 job list

[Guido van Rossum]

[Greg]
> And why *can't* we start on repackaging old module? I think the only
> reason that somebody came up with to NOT do it was "well, if we don't
> repackage the whole thing, then we should repackage nothing."  Which, IMO,
> is totally bogus. We'll never get anywhere operating under that principle.

The reason is backwards compatibility.  Assume we create a package
"web" and move all web related modules into it: httplib, urllib,
htmllib, etc.  Now for backwards compatibility, we add the web
directory to sys.path, so one can write either "import web.urllib" or
"import urllib".  But that loads the same code twice!  And in this
(carefully chosen :-) example, urllib actually has some state which
shouldn't be replicated.

Plus, it's too much work -- I'd rather focus on getting 1.6 out of the
door, and there's a lot of other stuff I need to do besides moving
modules around.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)