I've mostly run out of time to work on the docs, but I do want to say that I
thought long and hard about all the terminology decisions.  Please don't
change them lightly, and definitely don't change them until you've tried to go
through the documentation and make all the updates and read through them to
see how well it flows and makes sense.  It is *not* easy.

On Aug 01, 2012, at 05:13 AM, Eric Snow wrote:

>("importer" == finder + loader) sounds fine with me.

That's how I tried to think about it.  In some sense, it's just an
implementation detail, but where it comes into the play for the documentation
is the "path importer", which is the thing on sys.meta_path that implements
all the sys.path/sys.path_hooks/sys.path_importer_cache<sigh> semantics.

While technically a finder, calling it the "path finder" just does not work,
IMHO.  It's too confusing and causes the documentation to be less
comprehensible.  So the one compromise I made was to call this thing the "path
importer" because I think conceptually, if not strictly implementation-wise,
that term ties everything together.

A diagram would seal the deal I think.

>I'm find with changing "path importer" to "path finder".  If no one does a
>patch first, I'll put one up tomorrow.

Please don't, for reasons stated above!

>I actually prefer "path entry handler" for the distinctiveness, but I'm fine
>with leaving it be.  However, I get a sense that this is our one shot at this
>decision.

I don't think "handler" is a very good term.  These things *are* finders, even
if the API they support is richer and slightly different than meta path
finders.  Also, I think "path entry handler" could almost be just as useful
for the things on sys.path_hooks, although I do use "path entry hook" here.
But in a sense the callables on sys.path_hooks also "handle" path entries,
just in a different way.  I think "path entry finder" neatly describes both
its similarities and differences from other objects in the picture.

I'm going to leave all the abc names and implementations to you guys. :)

Thanks for all your excellent feedback and your own work on this nasty little
corner of Python. :)