[Python-Dev] Trickery with moving urllib

[Jeremy Hylton]

On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 11:38 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> There is going to be an issue with the current proposal for keeping
> around urllib. Since the package is to be named the same thing as the
> module, to handle the new name that means urllib.__init__ will need to
> gain the Py3K warning for the new name. But that doesn't quite work as
> the package's module will be imported automatically any time the
> module within the package is used.
>
> I see three solutions for dealing with this.
>
> 1. Have stubs for the entire urllib API in urllib.__init__ that raise
> a DeprecationWarning either specifying the new name or saying the
> function/class is deprecated.
>
> 2. Rename urllib to urllib.fetch or urllib.old_request to get people
> to move over to urllib.request (aka urllib2) at some point.
>
> 3. Ditch urllib completely and have people move to urllib.request
> directly from 2.6 going into 3.0.
>
> I was a fan of 3 in the stdlib SIG, but MAL argued well for 2 since so
> much code uses urllib (although I have always wondered how many
> *really* use urllib and how many could easily just move over to
> urllib2). The current solution of keeping around urllib's classes was
> a compromise, but I had not thought out the transition yet (and Jeremy
> Hylton will be running into this as he has volunteered to handle
> this).
>
> What do people think we should do?

I am migrating all the stdlib code to use urllib2 APIs when possible.
It seems straightforward enough to keep the old urllib classes in
urllib.request, but change the standard API functions (urlopen,
urlretrieve) to use the urllib2 implementation.

We could probably have a big collection of deprecation warnings in the
urllib/__init__ without much trouble.  It doesn't have any code at
this point.

Jeremy

>
> -Brett
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