[Python-Dev] Re: Christmas Wishlist (original) (raw)

Bill Janssen janssen at parc.com
Mon Dec 15 18:45:11 EST 2003

Why? I'd really like to see some concrete use cases for relative imports, other than just saving some typing.

Suppose you've developed a Python top-level application, composed of a package 'foo' containing a number of submodules and subpackages. You'd now like to add this to a Jython application as a library, part of a larger application. It's nice to be able to just add a higher-level package structure, com.mycompany.myapp, to the Python package, to fit in with the style of your application. Yet you don't want to edit the Python code to 'import com.mycompany.myapp.foo.submodule' everywhere; you'd like 'import submodule' or 'import foo.submodule' to continue working. Often the code has to work in both the stand-alone and the federated case.

This is just a special case of the federation problem that we've seen for years in distributed computing; previously top-level names get federated when new higher-level constructs are formed. Ken mentioned enterprise programming; it's another case of this. Two companies merge and start merging their code. It's much better to be able to write (in the new higher-level module bletch.py)

 import foo
 import bar

and have the subpackages under foo and bar continue to work without rewrites, than have to go through all the code under foo and bar and change it to know about the new higher-level bletch namespace.

Bill

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