[Python-Dev] importlib is now bootstrapped (and what that means) (original) (raw)

Stefan Behnel stefan_ml at behnel.de
Mon Apr 16 13:49:37 CEST 2012

Antoine Pitrou, 16.04.2012 13:13:

On Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:54:41 +0200 Stefan Behnel wrote:

The new import cache broke Cython's load of on-the-fly compiled extension modules, which naively used "import(modulename)" after building them. I could fix that by moving to "imp.loaddynamic()" (we know where we put the compiled module anyway), although I just noticed that that's not actually documented. So I hope that won't break later on. You can call importlib.invalidatecaches(). http://docs.python.org/dev/library/importlib.html#importlib.invalidatecaches

Well, yes, but imp.load_dynamic() would be the right thing to do for us. Is there a reason why it's not documented?

I would like to avoid changing the code to load_dynamic() now and then having to realise that that's going to die in 3.3 final because it somehow got in the way of the importlob rewrites and is not being considered a valuable enough public API.

New doc bug ticket:

http://bugs.python.org/issue14594

The next thing I noticed is that the old-style level -1 import no longer works, which presumably breaks a lot of Cython compiled modules. It used to work in the master branch until two days ago, now it raises a ValueError. We may be able to fix this by copying over CPython's old import code into Cython, but I actually wonder if this was really intended. If this feature wasn't deliberately broken in Py3.0, why break it now? Regressions should be reported on the bug tracker IMHO.

It was meant as more of a question for now, but here it goes:

http://bugs.python.org/issue14592

Stefan

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