[Python-Dev] On breaking modules into packages Was: [issue10199] Move Demo/turtle under Lib/

[Barry Warsaw]

On Oct 27, 2010, at 10:34 AM, R. David Murray wrote:

>To put your mind at ease, Barry, I'd not want to do that either :)

Phew!  But I wasn't worried, 'cause I know you're not insane.  (Though the
fact that you've effectively inherited the email package does bring that into
question. :)

>But by (IMO good) design Generator, FeedParser, and Message are all
>supposed to be independent (use only each other's public APIs).  And
>Header can be (and is, I think) used without the other pieces of email,
>as is true for other of the helper modules (base64mime, quoprimime, etc).

Agreed.

>On the other hand, I have no clue why 'iterators.py' exists :)

They're there for some corner use cases, but they do tend to be helpful.
body_line_iterator() is probably the one I've used the most.  The iterators
are intended to be used independently.

>The one that bugs me most, though, is MIME.  Combining all the mime
>stuff into one file seems like it would be a big win (not that it's
>possible, now).  What is the benefit of email.mime.text.MIMEText over
>email.mime.MIMEText, when each of the files in the mime package consists
>of a single subclass?

I think you're right that the extra level of module path is probably
unnecessary.  I'm not sure that means all the .py files in email/mime should
be combined though.  OTOH, `wc -l Lib/email/mime/*.py` is only 314 lines so
I'm happy to defer to you on that.

>So, to clarify, like Raymond I'm not saying that packages are always bad.
>I'm just saying that packages are also not always good; and, further,
>that the number of lines of code in a file should, IMO, have nothing to
>do with the decision as to whether or not to create a package.

+1
-Barry
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