[Python-Dev] Draft: PEP for imports (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Fri Jan 30 18:54:19 EST 2004

At 11:40 PM 1/30/04 +0000, Armin Rigo wrote:

A more radical point of view is that these sys.path hacks are here not because of a missing feature, but on the contrary to work around the way Python tries to isolate me from the "messiness out there" (the file system) by mapping it into a neat language construct (packages).

Without that, various kinds of "hacks" such as importing from DLLs/.so's, zipfiles, frozen modules, py2exe, PYTHONPATH, and the like, would not be practical. These use cases alone are enough to make me -1 on adding explicit paths into the module system from within code.

I'm much more interested in making non-module (but "read-only") files available through the package/module abstraction, than in breaking the abstraction to specify directories. For example, in PEAK I've implemented both a utility function ('fileNearModule("some.module","relative/path")') and a URL scheme ('pkgfile:some.module/relative/path') to support this.

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