When and how should all be defined?

salon_sue

When should a module define __all__ vs using the underscore convention? Should this be done manually or dynamically? Ideally, we could answer this once and for all with 'write it all out manually' and 'explicit is better than implicit', as has been said here . But in reality, cases such as these arise: You are writing an __all__ for the __init__.py in the top level of a package, re-exporting perhaps hundreds of public functions and classes...

Originally asked by JadenV15 on Stack Exchange (stackoverflow) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Self-aliasing marks an imported symbol as an explicit re-export. Type checkers (mypy with --no-implicit-reexport , Pyright in strict mode) follow the typing spec convention : an imported name is re-exported only if imported with a redundant alias or listed in __all__ . Without either, linters flag it as unused. from foo import bar # `foo.bar` imported but unused from foo import spam as spam __all__ can be used as an alternative to this method. from foo import ( bar, # `foo.bar` imported but unused spam, ) __all__ = ["spam"]

Full answer by Dorian Turba: https://stackoverflow.stackexchange.com/a/80003055 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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