[Pyobjc-dev] The meaning of __all__

[Jack J. <Jac...@cw...>]

There's a discussion over on the pyobjc developers mailing list at the 
moment about the use of __all__.

Some people suggested that for a certain module we only put "often 
used" items in __all__, so that "from module import *" will import only 
these commonly used items into your namespace. The module would contain 
other items which *are* useful and which should be callable from the 
outside, but these would have to be explicitly imported into your 
namespace (or used via "import objc; objc.SetVerbose()".

This doesn't feel right to me, as I've always used __all__ to mean "the 
whole externally visible API", and I've considered anything else that 
the module exports basically an artefact of the implementation. But 
when I looked this up in the reference manual it is rather vague about 
this.

Any opinions on the matter?
--
Jack Jansen, <Jac...@cw...>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
Goldman