Library versions

[Carl Banks]

On Jul 24, 8:56 am, Peo <paul... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm writing a library for doing sysadmin tasks at my workplace. These
> kind of
> scripts have a tendency to live for decades and I want to make sure
> that I don't break anything when I'm updating the library.
>
> My current plan is to call the library something like 'foo1' and
> import it into
> scripts like 'import foo1 as foo'. Releases that change the API would
> be installed
> as 'foo2', 'foo3' and so on. This works fine but it will be quite
> difficult
> to create new releases (documentation and library code are littered
> with
> references to 'foo1').
>
> Is there some other smart way to do acheive this?

The typical way to do this is to delegate responsibility to load the
most recent release to another module.  Create a module called foo.py,
and it have it import all the objects from the most recent release
module.  IOW, you should have a foo.py module that looks like this:


from foo1 import *


Which you update whenever there's a new release.  Then in your code
you simply use:


import foo


This is, incidentally, one of the few cases where it's recommended to
use from module import *.


Carl Banks