[Python-ideas] PEP for executing a module in a package containing relative imports (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Fri Apr 20 19:38:37 CEST 2007

"Brett Cannon" <brett at python.org> wrote:

I realized two things that I didn't mention in the PEP.

One is that Python will have to infer the proper package name for a module being executed. Currently Python only knows the name of a module because you asked for something and it tries to find a module that fits that request. But what is being proposed here has to figure out what you would have asked for in order for the import to happen. So I need to spell out the algorithm that will need to be used to figure out python bacon/_init_.py is the bacon package. Using the '-m' option solves this as the name is given as an argument.

There's also the rub that if you 'run' the module in /a/b/c/d/e/f.py, but all a-e are packages, the "proper" semantics may state that you need to import a/init.py, a/b/init.py, etc., prior to the execution of f.py .

Of course the only way that you would know that is if you checked the paths .../e/, .../d/, etc.

The PEP should probably be changed to state the order of imports in a case similar to this, and whether or not it bothers to check ancestor paths for package information.

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