[Python-ideas] My objections to implicit package directories

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 8:49 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:
>
> On 13 Mar, 2012, at 9:15, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
>>
>> I think it comes down to this: I really, really, really hate
>> directories with a suffix. I'd like to point out that the suffix is
>> also introducing a backwards incompatibility: everybody will have to
>> teach their tools, IDEs, and brains about .pyp directories,
>
> Directories with a suffix have the advantage that you could teach GUIs to treat
> them differently, filemanagers could for example show a ".pyp" directory as
> a folder with a python logo just like ".py"  files are shown as documents with
> a python logo.
>
> With the implicit approach it is much harder to recognize python packages as
> such without detailed knowledge about the import algorithm and python search
> path.

How's that working out for Java?

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)