[Python-Dev] New relative import issue

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Sep 19 05:46:59 CEST 2006


Armin Rigo wrote:

> My (limited) understanding of the motivation for relative imports is
> that they are only here as a transitional feature.  Fully-absolute
> imports are the official future.

Guido does seem to have a dislike for relative imports,
but I don't really understand why. The usefulness of
being able to make a package self-contained and movable
to another place in the package hierarchy without hacking
it seems self-evident to me.

What's happening in Py3k? Will relative imports still
exist?

> there
> is no clean way from a test module 'foo.bar.test.test_hello' to import
> 'foo.bar.hello': the top-level directory must first be inserted into
> sys.path magically.

I've felt for a long time that problems like this
wouldn't arise so much if there were a closer
connection between the package hierarchy and the
file system structure. There really shouldn't be
any such thing as sys.path -- the view that any
given module has of the package namespace should
depend only on where it is, not on the history of
how it came to be invoked.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | Carpe post meridiem!          	  |
Christchurch, New Zealand	   | (I'm not a morning person.)          |
greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz	   +--------------------------------------+


More information about the Python-Dev mailing list