Building packages

There are a number of techniques and tools available for creating and distributing packages. The truth is that Python does not have a great history of standardizing the packaging process. There have been multiple projects started in the first decade of the 21st century to streamline this process but not with a lot of success. In the last decade, we have had some success, thanks to the initiatives of the Python Packaging Authority (PyPA).

In this section, we will be covering techniques of building packages, accessing the packages in our program, and publishing and sharing the packages as per the guidelines provided by PyPA.

We will start with package names, followed by the use of an initialization file, and then jump into building a sample package.

Naming

Package names should follow the same rule for naming as for modules, which is lowercase with no underscores. Packages act like structured modules.

Package initialization file

A package can have an...