PEP 842 postmortem: how do we protect the standard library?

Hi, I recently wrote a proposal to hide private attributes from modules. My motivation for this was to prevent people from relying on stdlib internals. Now that the PEP has been withdrawn, I still think we need to find a way to achieve this goal, because the status quo of prefixing with _ just isn’t working. So – what should we do? From the discussion thread, the two ideas so far are: Implement something similar to PEP 842, but only for the standard library. Convert standard library modules ...