[Grok-dev] the grok package becoming an "import hub"

[Martijn Faassen]

On 02/16/2011 10:10 AM, Sylvain Viollon wrote:

>    In five.grok, I just do from grokcore.component import *, and __all__
>    is defined in both packages using the API interfaces. In five.grok,
>    the API interface inherit from the one of grokcore.component.

Cool, then we already have an example of this working.

>    Like that, if you add an import or a feature in grokcore.component,
>    and it is described in its API interface, it will be exported via
>    __all__ in both packages. So I don't need to touch five.grok to get
>    the new features of grokcore.component. I was thinking Grok did the
>    same, and I think * import with __all__ are the perfect use-case for
>    'hub-packages'.
>
>    After if you want to get a more 'magical hub', I am not sure of best
>    way of doing it: you could list the packages starting with grokcore
>    using pkg_resources, and automatically import names defined in their
>    __all__ variable, but some packages might redefined components
>    provided by other, so you like to be able to order this import step.

Yeah, I think this is too magic, also hard to understand for the reader. 
I'd like to see something like:

try:
    from grokcore.foo import *
except ImportError:
    print "Report: grokcore.foo could not be imported"

(with better logging integration for the reporting, perhaps simply a 
notify log so that it doesn't show up by default?)

I believe the grok package itself also defines an __all__ so it'd be 
good to construct that from the __all__ of the underlying packages 
somehow too.

Regards,

Martijn