[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 328 - Relative Imports (original) (raw)

Nicolas Fleury nidoizo at yahoo.com
Sat Sep 11 00:51:26 CEST 2004

Barry Warsaw wrote:

from global import logging

That would always import the global logging package. global is the optional "fake" global package and would only be used when you want to explicitly skip any local imports. IIRC though, Guido never liked this proposal much. I repost it here on the off chance that he's way too busy to read every message in this thread .

I agree with Guido. FWIW, I think imports should be absolute by default and that the statu quo is a mistake. The global solution makes absolute imports too verbose, when they are usually in majority. I also don't see any advantage (but clear disadvantages) to mix relative and absolute imports with the same syntax, so PEP328 is the way to go. Third party packages have 3 releases to adapt, so I don't see the problem.

You have to understand that with the global solution, I would make all my imports use that syntax, and that's really verbose. Where I work, we are many working in a root package and right now it's a mess because any new module can hide global modules to modules in same directory, so modules names must be chosen accordingly (we even run a test at night to make sure no import is relative). And yes, I would want to be able to name modules in a package with names like "math", "os", "pickle", "test", "unittest", etc. and not wait Python 3 for that capability. I also expect more standard modules to be in packages in future.

Regards, Nicolas

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