The work on the PEP continues and, following Eric Snow's helpful suggestions, I posted it on the Import-SIG mailing list to get some more feedback.

Otherwise, I will be looking into implementing PEP 402 "Simplified Package Layout and Partitioning" during the remaining part of the program. This PEP describes functionality related to dividing packages into separately installed components, aka "namespace packages".

Post-mid-term

This is just a quick note to say that my midterm evaluation was successful and I'm in fact slightly ahead of schedule. The remaining aims for the end of the program are:

• Controlling which modules can be loaded by white- and blacklisting
• Ensuring the ImportEngine class can be conveniently subclassed to extend/modify its behaviour
• Final testing and documentation (including the PEP)

More progress

Following finishing working on the code for now, I moved on to documentation. I started with drafting a short PEP which describes the proposed changes (I've actually had it written for a few days but I wanted to incorporate Nick's comments before making it public): Import Engine PEP XXX.

With the mid-term evaluation imminent, I revisited my proposal and made sure all the deliverables are in place. I ended up doing things in a different order, mainly because at the time of writing I didn't quite understand how things are organised in the code but it seems I got everything to work. The PEP draft and also some misc functionality are a nice bonus on top of that. This means during the second part of GSoC (assuming my evaluation goes smoothly), I should have time to make my code integrate well with importlib so that there's no code duplication etc. and also polish the PEP, as well as implement remaining features.

Progress!

After a few distracting days I had several very productive ones and now all the features projected for the mid-term evaluation are in place (yippee!), leaving me enough time for documenting the work that has been done. This includes drafting an update to PEP 302, proposing including the import engine functionality into the Python distribution. As I have no experience in writing this PEPs, in the past few days I've been reading different PEPs to get a feeling what style they're written in and started drafting my own. The process is unfortunately likely to take a few more days since I'm much slower to write English than Python ;)