[Python-Dev] Breaking undocumented API

[Barry Warsaw]

On Nov 11, 2010, at 12:41 AM, Alexander Belopolsky wrote:

>Is it OK to add __all__ to such modules that does not include all
>names not starting with an underscore?  Is it OK to then remove names
>that clearly were not intended to be public?

I would say in general, yes.  It's a good small modernization and stdlib
improvement.  However, this shouldn't be done as a bug fix to a stable
release, and care must be taken to consider backward compatibility.  IOW, if
you really think it's a name that is not used publicly, or is usually only
imported explicitly, then I think it's fine leaving it out of __all__.  It's
not a difficult change to work around.

-Barry

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