[Python-Dev] Undocumented PEP 302 protocol change by need-for-speed sprint

[Brett Cannon]

On 7/20/06, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
>
> While investigating the need to apply http://python.org/sf/1525766 I found
> that there was a modification to pkgutil during the need-for-speed sprint
> that affects the PEP 302 protocol in a backwards incompatible way.
>
> Specifically, PEP 302 documents that path_importer_cache always contains
> either importer objects or None.  Any code written to obtain importer
> objects is therefore now broken, because import.c is slapping False in for
> non-existent filesystem paths.
>
> The pkgutil module was then hacked to work around this problem, thereby
> hiding the breakage from at least the standard library, but not any
> external libraries that follow the PEP 302 protocol to find importers.
>
> There are several options as to how to proceed:
>
> 1. Revert the change
> 2. Document the breakage, update PEP 302, and make everybody update their
> code
> 3. Make it not break existing code, by using a NonexistentPathImporter or
> NullImporter type in place of "False" in sys.path_importer_cache.
>
> Any thoughts?


Revert it.  Is it really that much of a bonus to use False over None?  Both
evaluate to false and both are already singleton so you can use 'is' for
testing.

-Brett
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20060720/3e21b965/attachment.htm