At 05:18 PM 3/7/2011 -0500, Jim Fulton wrote:
If what we now call "packages" were called "modules", then we could start using the term "package" the way everyone else does. I think lots of people would be less confused.
It seems to me that in order to make that change, you have to get more people to change their terminology, since the set of people who need to refer to package[module] is larger than the set of people who need to refer to package[project]. (There is also a larger body of documentation associated with package[module].)
IOW, I think this proposal is a heavy uphill battle, both in the number of people to be convinced and the amount of documentation. In addition, the people who are calling a project a package can more easily understand the need to call it a project, than the people who are calling a package a package, will understand the need to call it a module. ;-)
Otherwise, I prefer we try hard to use the precise definitions above. This topic can be confusing enough without making it more so through sloppy terminology.
I think that this approach is more achievable: it requires only an official blessing, a relatively small amount of documentation to be changed, and the renaming of PyPI et al. (i.e. "Python Projects Index", projects.python.org, etc.)
("Projects Index" is a better name anyway, since some things on PyPI are not packages at all but applications, scripts, modules, plugins, etc.)
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