[Python-Dev] New relative import issue (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Fri Sep 22 02:40:03 CEST 2006

Guido van Rossum wrote:

While I agree with your idea(l), I don't think that's what Greg meant. He clearly say "sys.path should not exist at all".

Refining that a bit, I don't think there should be a single sys.path for the whole program -- more like each module having its own sys.path. And, at least in most cases, its contents should be set up from static information that exists outside the program, established when the module is installed.

One reason for this is the lack of any absolute notion of a "program". What is a program on one level can be part of a larger program on another level. For example, a module with test code that is run when it's invoked as a main script. Sometimes it's a program of its own, other times it's not. And it shouldn't matter whether it's a program or not when it comes to being able to find other modules that it needs to import. So using a piece of program-wide shared state for this seems wrong.

-- Greg

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