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

Gustavo Niemeyer niemeyer at conectiva.com
Tue Dec 16 09:17:46 EST 2003

But why do you have to give those packages a different full name? That's the question that I've never seen answered adequately.

I have done this many times, so let me try to describe at least one legitimate usage case.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a software which needs a third party package to work. OTOH, since it's a small package, I don't want to force the user to go after the package, even because I'd have to ensure that my code always work with the available version of that package.

Thanks to the relative module importing mechanism, solving that is no harder than copying the third party package into my own package namespace.

This idea could probably be expressed in some other way, hacking sys.path or whatever, but I belive this is a fairly common pattern, and I vote for introducing a scheme to differ between local/global importing which would not break the current flexibility.

-- Gustavo Niemeyer http://niemeyer.net

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