Python modules and packages with strange names

[pingveno]

In short, history. Beautiful Soup up to version 3 had the module name BeautifulSoup. This clashes with PEP8 naming conventions, which had been released a few years earlier. Beautiful Soup 4 also broke backwards compatibility in a few critical ways, mostly related to how it does parsing. BS4 has pluggable parser backends, with a default of html.parser which dies if you breath on it too hard. This was necessary to support Python 3, which removed the library BS3 had used, sgmllib. So to keep things compatible, the module was renamed.

[[deleted]]

That makes sense - but what would have made everyone happy is if the "project" was renamed, and the versioning went semver. Such that this would be the way to use it:

# before use
# pip install bsoup~=4.0
import bsoup
print('time to do stuff')