Note that I did not want to start a discussion about absolute vs. relative names (I believe everybody agrees that realtive file names are a Good Thing). The 'import __.module' thing is not new: ni.py had support for this and my patch simply adds it back to the implementation.
It was left out of the 1.5 package implementation on purpose, and I will fight proposals to get it back. It is an ugly hack that deserves to die. So there!
"Absolute" means fully qualified name, i.e. the complete path to the modules from the top-level root via all subpackage down to the module name itself, e.g. TextTools.Constants.TagTable.
No disagreement there. BTW, The compatibility issues with class references in object databases need to be resolved in a different way -- package renamings are but one of the problems here. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)