[Python-Dev] Relative vs. absolute imports (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Mon May 17 10:20:37 EDT 2004

At 03:42 PM 5/17/04 +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

I have a few questions about the PEP 328 which I'd like discussed:

* Why do we absolutely need to change the current scheme of 'local, then absolute' for name resolution ?

Because there's no way to override the current scheme without calling import directly.

* How will the proposed 'absolute only' strategy affect the import() API ?

It doesn't change the API, only what arguments it gets called with. Passing a different globals dictionary is all that's required to effect an absolute import.

* Will the DeprecationWarning only be raised for uses of 'import xyz' and 'from xyz import a' or also for import() ?

It should not be for import().

* How do these semantics changes affect importers that hook into import ? (imputil.py, ihooks.py, etc.)

* What's the affect on zip imports or tools like py2exe, McMillan's installer, etc. ?

Again, since the import API isn't changing, it shouldn't affect any of this.

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