Namespace conflict

[Dawid Marszałkiewicz]

After install the module via pip, there is a namespace conflict between this module and pyserial. Pyserial, in fact, uses 'serial' namespace. Won't it be better idea to change name of this module?

[Petteri Aimonen]

Indeed, pyserial is very widely used and already reserves the "serial" name. It would be easier to rename this package, as it is quite new.

[James Swineson]

Please change your project's namespace to serialize or something else... the conflict between this and pyserial is causing major problems here.

[Iman Gowhari]

You are the owner of this namespace, so it’s up to you, if you rename your package it would be a great help to many people.

[David Belais]

Please see sob.

[Petteri Aimonen]

Please remove the old serial package from pypi: https://pypi.org/project/serial/

[Iman Gowhari]

Devid, that’s very kind of you man to help the community like that.

@Petteri Aimonen I think removing the package will make same issue again, as someone else will use it.

It might stay on pypi as a placeholder with a warning on install and import, or pyserial owner should take it.

[David Belais]

The last version version of serial on PYPI throws an error if you try to install it alongside pyserial. Removing the package from PYPI would break applications with that dependency, so I won’t do that, however there is no reason why the existence of that package should impede your use of pyserial.

[Iman Gowhari]

The main problem that happens for people is they install serial instead of pyserial, not alongside of that. A normal project has a requirements.txt or something that define exact dependencies, so it doesn’t happens like that.

It normally happens when people send a snippet to someone else, or they want to test a sample code from internet, they see import serial and simply they try pip install serial, I guess it has happened for many people, and it will happen again, as serial is still there.

I agree that serial should be there forever, as certainly it’s in dependency list of other’s projects. But for example it’s possible to release a major version, that throws an error on install and use. Or do you have another suggestion to prevent the issue?

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[Laur Joost]

Anyone trying to use pyserial will at some point try to create the serial.Serial object. Is it possible to simply emit an exception with a message indicating the existence of sob and pyserial from the constructor when this happens, instead of falling back on the rather less informative AttributeError: module 'serial' has no attribute 'Serial'?

Really sorry to drag this up again, and if you’re “so done with this shit”, perfectly understandable. But over the years I’ve installed serial instead of pyserial exactly as many times as I’ve set up a new python environment. The time it takes to find the 'bug' has gotten less with each time, but the annoyance remains.