2007-10-18

Would anyone attend a tutorial on import at PyCon?

I just finished my proposal for PyCon for a talk on how import works. I managed to squeeze it into 30 minutes, although I could fit in extra details on things such as how built-in, extension, and frozen modules are handled. I could also show pseudocode to make what I am discussing more obvious.

Then that got me thinking about how I could possibly make this into a tutorial. With a thorough section on how import works and covering all the details. I could then detail the PEP 302 extensions. I could then dive into writing an importer/loader from scratch that did interesting things (e.g., cryptographically signed code, code the automatically checked for new minor/micro releases of itself, a sqlite3 back-end, etc.). And obviously I would cover importlib usage so people didn't have to write stuff from scratch if they didn't want to (hopefully by the time PyCon rolls around importlib will at least be in Py3K if not 2.6).

But obviously a tutorial takes more time and effort than a 30 minute presentation. Plus I have never done a tutorial this long (I have done two hour presentations on learning Python, but that was a presentation, not something with handouts). So before I even bother considering this, I wanted to see if anyone out there would even attend such a tutorial.

So please email me or leave a comment if you would seriously be willing to pay money to listen to me talk about import stuff for three hours.