What is __path__ useful for?
- by Jason Baker
I had never noticed the __path__ attribute that gets defined on some of my packages before today. According to the documentation:
Packages support one more special
attribute, __path__. This is
initialized to be a list containing
the name of the directory holding the
package’s __init__.py before the code
in that file is executed. This
variable can be modified; doing so
affects future searches for modules
and subpackages contained in the
package.
While this feature is not often
needed, it can be used to extend the
set of modules found in a package.
Could somebody explain to me what exactly this means and why I would ever want to use it?