[Python-Dev] ImportWarning flood (original) (raw)

James Y Knight foom at fuhm.net
Wed Jun 28 21:29:11 CEST 2006

On Jun 25, 2006, at 9:47 PM, James Y Knight wrote:

On Jun 24, 2006, at 1:29 PM, Ralf W. Grosse-Kunstleve wrote:

--- Jean-Paul Calderone <exarkun at divmod.com> wrote: I think it is safe to say that Twisted is more widely used than anything Google has yet released. Twisted also has a reasonably plausible technical reason to dislike this change. Google has a bunch of engineers who, apparently, cannot remember to create an empty init.py file in some directories sometimes.

Simply adding a note to the ImportError message would solve this problem "just in time":

import mypackage.foo Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? ImportError: No module named mypackage.foo Note that subdirectories are searched for imports only if they contain an init.py file: http://www.python.org/doc/essays/packages.html I also dislike the warning solution. Making the ImportError message more verbose seems like a much nicer solution.

I just found another reason to dislike the warnings: my homedir on
one machine has a lot of random directories in it. One of them is
named "readline". Every time I run python 2.5, it now helpfully notes: sys:1: ImportWarning: Not importing directory 'readline': missing
init.py

It used to be the case that it was very unlikely that running python
in your homedir would cause issues. Even though the current directory
is on the default pythonpath, you needed to have either a file ending
in .py or a directory with an init.py with the same name as a
python module to cause problems. And that is generally unlikely to
happen. Now, however, you get warnings just by having any directory
in your CWD with the same name as a python module. That's much more
likely to happen; I can't be the only one who will have this issue.

I'd like to suggest the simple solution quoted above with a constant
string added to the ImportError message would be good enough, and
better than the current warning situation. Clearly it would be even
better if someone did the complicated thing of keeping track of which
directories would have been used had they had init.py files in
them, and appending that to the eventual ImportError message, but I
don't think removing the warning should be held up on doing that.

James

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