The first thing that importlib.reload() does is to verify that the passed module is an instance of types.ModuleType (Lib/importlib/__init__.py:107). This check seems unnecessary to me. We really don't have a functional need for the check (that I know of). Furthermore, there has been at least one serious proposal recently that suggested using custom module types. The only benefit that I can think of to the type check is it makes the failure more clear when someone tries to "reload" an attribute in a module (thinking just the attribute will get reloaded!). However, does that matter all that much now that reload() is not a builtin (ergo less likely to get misused very often)? I'm not invested in removing these 2 lines (or at least loosening the restriction). I've brought it up simply because it keeps staring me in the face lately. :-) If anyone has any objections, I'll drop it (at least it will be recorded here in the tracker). That said, I'm glad to remove the restriction otherwise.
I think the check can be removed as long as an AttributeError is caught when trying to access module.__name__ and a message mentioning that the user probably meant to pass in a module is used, e.g.: try: name = module.__spec__.name except AttributeError: try: name = module.__name__ except AttributeError: raise TypeError("argument should be a module")
