[Python-Dev] unexpected import behaviour (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Jul 31 17:50:02 CEST 2010

On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:

On 31/07/2010 16:30, Nick Coghlan wrote:

With my change, that code would work just fine. "from myproject.gizmo import main" and "from main import main" would just return the same object, whereas currently they return something different.

Have you looked at the code in that example? I don't think it would work...

Ah, I see what you mean - yes, there would need to be some additional work done to detect the case of direct execution from within a package directory in order to set main.package accordingly (as if the command line had been "python -m myproject.gizmo" rather than "python myproject/gizmo.py"). Even then, the naming problem would remain.

Still, this kind of the thing is the reason I'm reluctant to arbitrarily change the existing semantics - as irritating as they can be at times (with pickling/unpickling problems being the worst of it, as pickling in particular depends on the value in name being correct), people have all sorts of workarounds kicking around that need to be accounted for if we're going to make any changes.

I kind of regret PEP 366 being accepted in the package form now. At one point I considered proposing something like module_name instead, but I didn't actually need that extra information to solve the relative import issue, and nobody else mentioned the pickling problem at the time.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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