July 29, 2004
6:20 p.m.
It's going to be difficult to ensure that nothing ever gets a reference to a broken module, because of circular imports. Suppose A imports B, which imports A. If A's initialisation subsequently fails, then even if A is removed from sys.modules, B still contains a reference to the broken A.
Yeah, but I don't mind; my patch is still a big improvement in other cases and doesn't really make things any worse in the above case (B has a reference to a broken A, just like without my patch). Did anybody look at my patch? Shall I check it in? --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)