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 ;)
It's actually a new PEP that will supplement 302 rather than replace it - supporting the API changes will be optional, as old importers/loaders will continue to work quite happily at the global level without being aware of the import engine API.
ReplyDeleteAlso, don't stress too much about the details of the English - I can help with that aspect.
I'm really excited for this project. Is it going to integrate with importlib, or is it focused on the (CPython) builtin __import__ for now? BTW, are you on the import-sig mailing list?
ReplyDeleteActually, it looks like you already indicated that your focus is on changes to importlib only. Is that the case?
ReplyDeleteYes, for now we're focusing on importlib. But I'm working on the PEP now, and if it gets accepted I would be happy to extend it to the C implementation after GSoC. I guess a lot depends if the import engine is to be an alternative way of importing modules or if it should have more central role.
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ReplyDeleteSweet. Sounds like you are spot on. And hopefully the C implementation will be unnecessary (if importlib.__import__ replaces the builtin __import__ in 3.3). Are you targeting your midterm deadline for the PEP?
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