Using hyphen/dash in python repository name and package name

Question

I am trying to make my git repository pip-installable. In preparation for that I am restructuring the repo to follow the right conventions. My understanding from looking at

Answer 1

To answer your 1st point let me rephrase my answer to a different question.

The biggest source of misunderstanding is that the word "package" is heavily overloaded. There are 4 different names in the game — the name of the repository, the name of the directory being used for development (the one that contains setup.py), the name of the directory contained __init__.py and other importable modules, the name of distribution at PyPI. Quite often these 4 are the same or similar but that's not required.

The names of the repository and development directory can be any, their names don't play any role. Of course it's convenient to name them properly but that's only convenience.

The name of the directory with Python files name the package to be imported. Once the package is named for import the name usually stuck and cannot be changed.

The name of the distribution gives one a page at PyPI and the name of distribution files (source distribution, eggs, wheels). It's the name one puts in setup(name='distribution') call.

Let me show detailed real example. I've been maintaining a templating library called CheetahTemplate. I develop it in the development directory called cheetah3/. The distribution at PyPI is called Cheetah3; this is the name I put into setup(name='Cheetah3'). The top-level module is Cheetah hence one does import Cheetah.Template or from Cheetah import Template; that means that I have a directory cheetah3/Cheetah/.

The answer to 2 is: you can have dashes in repository names and PyPI distribution names but not in package (directories with __init__.py files) names and module (.py files) names because you cannot write in Python import xy-zzy, that would be subtraction and SyntaxError.

Point 3: The site and the repository names are scikit-learn, as well as the distribution name, but the importable package (the top-level directory with __init__.py) is sklearn.

PEP 8 has nothing to do with the question as it doesn't talk about distribution, only about importable packages and modules.