http://bugs.python.org/issue14551 discusses the deprecation and removal of imp.load_source. In the discussion, there seems to be a general consensus that (1) a convenience function for loading modules from an arbitrary file is a good thing and (2) that many people use it. I can only concur, the need for loading a module from an arbitrary file without having to worry about sys.path or __init__.py is useful for supporting plugin-like extensibility/configurability and I personally use imp.load_source in a couple of projects. However, the discussions in http://bugs.python.org/issue14551 seemed to have died off without any clear decision for action. Can we consider adding such a convenience function to importlib in Python 3? Best, Mart Sõmermaa