On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 17:00 -0700, Michael McNeil Forbes wrote:
One could use an environmental variable such as NUMPY_SUPPRESS_TOP_LEVEL_IMPORTS, that, if defined, suppresses the importing of unneeded packages. This would only affect systems that define this variable, thus not breaking the API but providing the flexibility for those that need it. (This or a similar variable could also contain a list of the numpy components to import automatically.)
This does not sound like a good idea to me. It would mean that you effectively have two code paths depending on the environment variable, with more problems to support (people would use this option, but many other software would break without them knowing why; typically, scipy would not work anymore). I think that import numpy.core being slower than import numpy is a bug which can be solved without breaking anything, though. cheers, David