Hacker News Reader

Comment by socratic | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if namespace packages actually work?

I've been wanting to put up a few utility libraries on Github. I don't think they're good enough for PyPI, and I mostly just want to be able to pip install them and have access to a few minor functions that I use periodically. However, I don't think they deserve their own top level library name, ideally, they'd all be under "socratic.*" or similar. However, there seems to be some sort of mess with init in the top level of the package, some pkgutil fix, some sort of incomplete PEP (maybe 402?), etc. Should I just give up and name my internal libraries "socratic_{name}" and be done with it? Or does having multiple packages with the same namespace work?

View on HN

> Does anyone know if namespace packages actually work?

They used to work somewhat. I had flaskext.* registered as a namespace package but unfortunately it conflicts with pip which is why new Flask extensions name their package `flask_bar` instead of `flaskext.bar`. The exact problem is that setuptools uses pth magic to put libraries into a namespace package which conflicts with pip's idea of installing packages flat into site-packages.

It gets bad if you use pip and easy_install with namespace packages. If you stick to one or the other you should generally be okay.

But yes, just use socratic_{name} – it makes everything easier, and "." and "_" are just string differences. The only good reason IMHO for using namespace packages is because you are breaking up an existing package into multiple packages and you want to keep the dotted names. And even then I might just prefer a compatibility package that does the mapping and move things to entirely new package names.

it has some rough edges, sometimes when I try to build the docs for one it has a hard time importing both packages until I kick it a few times, but they work. I'm doing it for these two modules:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dogpile.core/ http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dogpile.cache/

edit: also they work fine with pip so not sure what armin's issue here is.

> edit: also they work fine with pip so not sure what armin's issue here is.

See this issue which ultimately made me ditch them: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/3

Reply on news.ycombinator.com