PEP 561 currently states the following:

Package maintainers who wish to support type checking of their code MUST add a marker file named py.typed to their package supporting typing.

I consider this requirement to be problematic for Python libraries that are written in another programing language and distributed as compiled .so files. PEP 561 currently does not provide a way to mark .so files residing directly in site-packages/ to be typed, resulting in typed shared libraries needing to introduce an intermediary __init__.py file such as the following:

from ._native import *

__doc__ = _native.__doc__
if hasattr(_native, "__all__"):
    __all__ = _native.__all__

While this works for static type checkers I think this is obviously suboptimal because it has several undesired side-effects. Let's take the following as an example:

site-packages
├── my_project
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── _native.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so
│   └── py.typed

The unintended side-effects are:

1. You can import my_project._native.
2. _native shows up in the documentation generated by pydoc. E.g. under PACKAGE CONTENTS for the documentation of my_project and invoking e.g. help(my_project.foobar) will tell you that foobar resides in the module my_project._native.
3. my_project.__file__ now is the __init__.py file instead of the .so file, potentially misleading developers into thinking the package is implemented in Python

So I really think PEP 561 should be amended to provide some way of marking single-file packages as "typed" without having to resort to hacks such as defining an intermediary __init__.py since that introduces a bunch of undesired side-effects that have the potential to confuse API users.

What do you think about this?