[Python-Dev] Lazy importing (was Rethinking intern() and its data structure)

[Greg Ewing]

Nick Coghlan wrote:

> I sometimes wish for a nice, solid lazy
> module import mechanism that manages to avoid the potential deadlock
> problems created by using import statements inside functions.

I created an ad-hoc one of these for PyGUI recently.
I can send you the code if you're interested.

I didn't have any problems with deadlocks, but I
did find one rather annoying problem. It seems that
an exception occurring at certain times during the
import process gets swallowed and turned into a
generic ImportError. I had to resort to catching
exceptions and printing my own traceback in order
to diagnose missing auto-imported names.

-- 
Greg