[Twisted-Python] Progress report on splitting packages

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

On Tuesday 20 April 2004 11:29 am, Itamar Shtull-Trauring wrote:
 > On Tue, 2004-04-20 at 10:57, James Y Knight wrote:
 > > Using twisted.* would be better if twisted.core was in twisted.core but
 > > even without that the name sounds fine to me.
 > >
 > > So, can it not be done technically?
 >
 > I think so, yes.

I've been quiet here lately, but am interested in this discussion since I've 
been working on packaging issues for Zope 3.

One thing that's interesting to note is that distutils actually allows 
installing subpackages directly.  For example, it's possible to install 
twisted.news separately from other twisted.* packages (let's ignore 
dependencies for the moment).

The only interesting dependency for twisted.news is the top-level twisted 
package.  If that's a "pure container" package (it contains only a trivial 
__init__.py), then it only needs to be released and packaged once, and it 
won't create dependency issues.  Some twisted.core package would be a 
dependency for practical issues, but distutils will grow some support for 
versionable dependencies like that (there's preliminary, undocumented support 
in the Python 2.4 CVS).

My point is that there's no technical reason not to use the "twisted." prefix; 
there may be other reasons not to, but that would be something for the 
Twisted developers and maintainers to determine.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation