Well, but since you want all imports to be global, it'd be insane to introduce *new* syntax for global imports, wouldn't it?
If we banned relative (a.k.a. local) imports, yes definitely.
from __future__ global_imports
I think this ought to be a *global* flag rather than a per-module flag. E.g. after setting sys.allow_relative_import = False all imports anywhere would be interpreted as absolute imports. This would mean you couldn't have some code that still uses relative imports, but the problem with the __future__ statement is that it seems so pointless: packages that only use absolute imports don't need it, and packages that use relative imports break if it is used. About the only time where the __future__ statement would make a difference is when a package defines a local module whose name is the same as that of a global module, *and* the package also wants to import the global module. I would personally solve that by renaming the local module though... --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)