During Guido's review, we discovered that PEP 382 doesn't deal with PEP 302 loaders; I believe that it should, though. Rather than coming up with an ad-hoc design, I propose to defer the PEP to Python 3.2 - unless somebody can propose a straight-forward design with not too many new interfaces. FWIW, my own approach would be to add two new interfaces to loaders: 1. extend the package path according to .pth files available to the loader (alternatively, provide the contents of the .pth files of the package in question) 2. search for and execute a package initialization module. Regards, Martin