[Python-Dev] Enhancing the shutil module

[Steve Steiner (listsin)]

On Jan 18, 2010, at 8:34 AM, Masklinn wrote:

> On 18 Jan 2010, at 13:40 , Nick Coghlan wrote:
>> 
>> Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>>> There's one remaining external call for "zip" done if the zip module
>>> is not found, but I am happy to remove it and throw an exception if
>>> it's not found, and keep the external "zip" call on Distutils side, so
>>> shutil stays 100% stdlib-powered.
>> 
>> +1 for that approach. These changes all sound like nice additions to
>> shutil, and hooray for every module that gets adopted by an active
>> maintainer :)
> 
> Isn't it a bit weird to include that to shutil though? shutil advertises itself as "a number of high-level operations on files and collections of files." and from what I understood it was a bunch of shell-type utility functions to easily copy, move or remove files and directories (that's pretty much all there is in it at this time).
> 
> Wouldn't it make more sense to put those "archive utils" functions/objects in a new module separate from shutil, dealing specifically with cross-archive APIs and linked from the current archive-specific modules (essentially, just take the current archive_util, move it to the toplevel of the stdlib and maybe rename it)? It would also make the module much easier to find when searching through the module listing, I think.

As much of a pain as it is to get new modules accepted, I agree that mixing archiving functions into shutil is not the right way to do it and that a separate archive_util module would make much more sense and would give a logical place to put any extensions to archive handling.

S