Moving to an OOP model from an classically imperitive one

[tim.thelion at gmail.com]

Hello,

I am currently writting a program called subuser(subuser.org), which is written as classically imperative code.  Subuser is, essentially, a package manager.  It installs and updates programs from repositories.

I have a set of source files https://github.com/subuser-security/subuser/tree/master/logic/subuserCommands/subuserlib which have functions in them.  Each function does something to a program, it identifies the program by the programs name.  For example, I have an installProgram function defined as such:

def installProgram(programName, useCache):

Now I've run into a flaw in this model.  There are certain situations where a "programName" is not a unique identifier. It is possible for two repositories to each have a program with the same name.  Obviously, I could go through my code and replace all use of the string "programName" with a tuple of (programName, repository).  Or I could define a new class with two attributes: programName and repository, and pass such a simple object arround, or pass a dictionary.  However, I think this would be better solved by moving fully to an OOP model.  That is, I would have a SubuserProgram class which had methods such as "install", "describe", "isInstalled"...

There is one problem though.  Currently, I have these functions logically organized into source files, each between 40 and 170 LOC.  I fear that if I were to put all of these functions into one class, than I would have a single, very large source file.  I don't like working with large source files for practicall reasons.  If I am to define the class SubuserProgram in the file SubuserProgram.py, I do not want all <https://github.com/subuser-security/subuser/blob/master/logic/subuserCommands/subuserlib/run.py#L162> of run.py to be moved into that file as well.

I thought about keeping each method in a separate file, much as I do now, something like:

###################
#FileA.py
###################
def a(self):
  blah

###################
#FileB.py
###################
def b(self):
  blah

###################
#Class.py
###################
import FileA, FileB
class C:
  a=FileA.a
  b=FileB.b

This works, but I find that it is hard to read.  When I come across FileA, and I see "self" it just seems very confusing.  I suffer a bout of "who-am-i"ism.

I asked on IRC and it was sugested that I use multiple classes, however I see no logical way to separate a SubuserProgram object into multiple classes.

So I thought I would seek your advice.

Tim