[Distutils] Adding entry points into Distutils ?

[P.J. Eby]

At 08:28 PM 5/6/2009 +0200, Hanno Schlichting wrote:
>Doug Hellmann wrote:
> > On May 6, 2009, at 1:46 PM, P.J. Eby wrote:
> >
> >> At 10:59 AM 5/6/2009 -0400, Doug Hellmann wrote:
> >>
> >>> On May 5, 2009, at 10:50 PM, P.J. Eby wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> At 12:03 PM 5/6/2009 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> >>>>> I don't see any advantage, in the context of this discussion, to
> >>>>> having an additional, incompatible naming for full-path-to-a-class.
> >>>>
> >>>> Setuptools doesn't limit an entry point to being a class, function,
> >>>> or other top-level name within a module.  It can be a method of a
> >>>> class, or an attribute of an attribute.  The ':' removes any
> >>>> ambiguity as to which part of the name is the module, and which
> >>>> parts are attributes within that module.
> >>>
> >>> Is that level of complexity useful in practice?  I can understand how
> >>> it came to be implemented, but is it actually used by any projects?
> >>
> >> I use it; I'm not sure who else does.
> >>
> >> The particular use case I have (and that's most likely to be shared)
> >> is that the calling app or framework wants a callable or function, but
> >> the providing app or library implements that callable as a classmethod
> >> for convenience.
> >
> > That's pretty much what I expected.  It feels a little messy to have
> > plugins exposing "internals" like that but not so much so that I propose
> > we don't allow it. The ":" syntax seems like the right way to go.
>
>I'd be tempted to call this an edge-case. You should be able to expose
>the internal detail you'd need via a module scope alias for the
>particular case. That seems easier than providing a whole new notion.

Ah, now you reminded me of a forgotten detail: the specific use case 
was that I had a library with a Command class that was widely used as 
a base class; simply adding a classmethod to that base class allowed 
all the existing classes to be used as plugins without any change to 
their modules' source code: the entry points just always reference 
the classmethod.