[Python-Dev] question/comment about documentation of relative imports (original) (raw)

Darren Dale dsdale24 at gmail.com
Tue Oct 5 19:28:19 CEST 2010

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 12:43 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

On Tue, 05 Oct 2010 17🔞18 +0100 Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:

> > Generally I'm +0 on relative imports as a whole.

As the OP pointed out, for code that may be included in other projects there is no other choice. This is often useful for packages shared between one or two projects that nonetheless don't warrant separate distribution. You can put several packages in a single distribution.

Thats not the point though. Due to compatibility issues, maybe I don't want to expose the code at the top level. Maybe the foo package is distributed elsewhere as a top-level package, but I need to use an older version due to compatibility problems. I certainly don't want to risk overwriting a pre-existing installation of foo with my required version of foo. This is not a hypothetical, we once had exactly this problem when we distributed an old version of enthought.traits with matplotlib (even though we checked for pre-existing installations, crufty build/ directories containing the out-of-date traits package were overwriting existing installations).

Darren

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