[MAL]
I've spent the last two hours trying to get relative package imports to work because I need them for my extension packages which will soon all move under a new top-level package name to overcome the conflicts with PIL and Zope. [GvR] I'd much rather use absolute package names for anything that's not in the same directory as the current module. [JimF] I'll second Marc-Andre here.
A significant headache occurs when you have a package that has sub-packages. Sub-packages need to be able to reference other sub-packages within the same package without knowing where the containing package is installed.
You never need to know where it is installed. When I said absolute package name I meant package name (e.g. zope.foo.bar.subpack) not filename. As Tim has argued, the ability to change the name of the toplevel here is a liability, not a feature. (On reduced bandwidth here, hence not so subtle.) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)