On 3/7/2016 12:22 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
In theory, though, since it doesn't change syntax, it could be something like:
import sys sys.package_mode_ACTIVATE()
The trouble is that doing this after _any_ imports (including the ones that are done before your script starts) will risk those imports being resolved from local files.
Barring a setting in $PYTHONPATH, Python's startup imports will not be resolved from local files. It appears that '' or scriptdir are only added to sys.path afterwards. I base this on an experiment where I tried to shadow one of the Python-coded /lib modules with a local file.
C-coded builtin modules cannot be shadowed. I discovered this by experiment and then found
"Python includes a number of default finders and importers. The first one knows how to locate built-in modules, and the second knows how to locate frozen modules. A third default finder searches an import path for modules. The import path is a list of locations that may name file system paths or zip files."
https://docs.python.org/3/reference/import.html#finders-and-loaders
I consider the behavior of local versus stdlib imports depending on the stdlib implementation language to be somewhat problematical. There was discussion of shadowing, I believe here, a few months ago (sometime after 3.5.0 was released).
Having "import X" after activating package mode is useless if X gets resolved from sys.modules, and it'd be a nightmare to debug.
If the -p parameter is a problem, maybe there could be an environment variable that changes the default? Then people could opt-in to pseudo-package mode globally, run all their tests, and see what stops working.
FWIW, I do want this to eventually become the default behaviour. But it wouldn't be any time soon; in the meantime, it would be easy enough to recommend that people just "always do this to be safe" (in the same way that Python 2 didn't make new-style classes the default, but everyone's advised to "always subclass object"). By making it a long-term non-default feature, Python gets to provide safety without breaking anyone's code.
You might want to look at previous discussions of shadowing if you can find them.