[Import-SIG] PEP 395 (Module aliasing) and the namespace PEPs

[PJ Eby]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 1:29 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, without a clear answer to the question of "from module X, inside
> package (or package portion) Y, find the nearest parent directory that
> should be placed on sys.path" in a PEP 402 based world, I'm switching
> to supporting PEP 382 as my preferred approach to namespace packages.
> In this case, I think "explicit is better than implicit" means, "given
> only a filesystem hierarchy, you should be able to figure out the
> Python package hierarchy it contains". Only explicit markers (either
> files or extensions) let you do that - with PEP 402, the filesystem
> doesn't contain enough information to figure it out, you need to also
> know the contents of sys.path.
>

After spending an hour or so reading through PEP 395 and trying to grok
what it's doing, I actually come to the opposite conclusion: that PEP 395
is violating the ZofP by both guessing, and not encouraging One Obvious Way
of invoking scripts-as-modules.

For example, if somebody adds an __init__.py to their project directory,
suddenly scripts that worked before will behave differently under PEP 395,
creating a strange bit of "spooky action at a distance".  (And yes, people
add __init__.py files to their projects in odd places -- being setuptools
maintainer, you get to see a LOT of weird looking project layouts.)

While I think the __qname__ idea is fine, and it'd be good to have a way to
avoid aliasing main (suggestion for how included below), I think that
relative imports failing from inside a main module should offer an error
message suggesting you use "-m" if you're running a script that's within a
package, since that's the One Obvious Way of running a script that's also a
module.  (Albeit not obvious unless you're Dutch.  ;-) )

For the import aliasing case, AFAICT it's only about cases where __name__
== '__main__', no?  Why not just save the file/importer used for __main__,
and then have the import machinery check whether a module being imported is
about to alias __main__?  For that, you don't need to know in *advance*
what the qualified name of __main__ is - you just spot it the first time
somebody re-imports it.

I think removing qname-quessing from PEP 395 (and replacing it with
instructive/google-able error messages) would be an unqualified
improvement, independent of what happens to PEPs 382 and 402.
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