[Distutils] specifying the shipping of subpackages without their superpackages

[Ronny Pfannschmidt]

On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 13:03 +0000, Chris Withers wrote:
> Ronny Pfannschmidt wrote:
> > i recently noticed that shipping a package like 'foo.bar' without also
> > shipping 'foo' seems to work fine in distutils.
> > 
> > since that would be nice way to ship packages within a namespace i want
> > to sugest specifying the fact that it works and to clarify how it works.
> 
> There's already for PEP for namespace packages...

Yes, but that only deals with package namespacing in terms of the import
system, not a single word about how things get installed within
namespaces.

The current way is to ship dozens of virtually empty __init__.py files
in the superpackages
(i.e. only the call to pkgutil in order to extend __path__)

I consider that unfortunate and undesirable.

I see a clear need to add convient names at the package level and the
current way to deal with namespaces cant handle that.

The ability to install subpackages while ignoring superpackages is a way
to archieve that, cause nothing will overwrite the superpackages
__init__.py.
So it may be subject to usefull additions beyond the mere __path__
extension,

Ronny