[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 328 -- relative and multi-line import (original) (raw)

Aahz aahz at pythoncraft.com
Fri Apr 9 11:42:52 EDT 2004

On Wed, Apr 07, 2004, Bill Janssen wrote:

I really wish I'd been paying more attention to 328, which I've just read. This proposal seems to break lots and lots and lots of existing code. Maybe I'm reading it wrong. I've written many, many packages that use the form import foo where "foo" is a sibling module in the package.

You won't be able to do that anymore.

Or

from foo import bar where, again, foo is a sibling to the current module. Packages that work like this have been submitted to on-line libraries, printed in books, etc., etc., etc.

You'll have to change these to

from .foo import bar

I really hope I'm reading the PEP wrong! Am I correct in thinking that come Python 2.4 or 2.5, these will just break if the package isn't at the top level (reachable from sys.path)?

They won't break until Python 2.6. Python 2.5 will issue a DeprecationWarning when it finds relative imports.

I was thinking (some months ago) that y'all would come up with an absolute form instead, something like

from / import os

Nope. Absolute imports are the most common form, and we do want to encourage absolute imports whenever possible (because of the conflicts with the stdlib). Relative imports should be "marked".

Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/

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