[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 328 - Relative Imports (original) (raw)

Jim Fulton jim at zope.com
Fri Sep 10 13:46:58 CEST 2004

M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

Guido van Rossum wrote:

...

As long as it's clear that this is a compatibility requirement only I think it's a good idea to support this way of developing apps (even though I think that clever sys.path manipulation can probably get around it, it's not worth breaking existing approaches). All new apps should however use relative imports to reference their own code, so the problem won't be repeated in the future.

I have my doubts that this is going to happen. People are more likely going to make all imports absolute (like they already do in Java and other languages) - which is good, since it makes reading code much easier and allows for writing packages which are compatible to older Python version, but it also prevent developing applications using the above approach. I also don't think that extension writers will care enough to make their packages fully relocateable by using relative imports all over - these are hard to read and don't buy the developer of the extension anything.

I find explicit relative imports easier to read, as it reduces the noise level.

I like the fact that local imports look different from non-local ones.

Jim

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