[Python-Dev] question/comment about documentation of relative imports

[Darren Dale]

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 1:45 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> Le mardi 05 octobre 2010 à 13:28 -0400, Darren Dale a écrit :
>> >>
>> >> As the OP pointed out, for code that may be *included* in other projects
>> >> there is no other choice. This is often useful for packages shared
>> >> between one or two projects that nonetheless don't warrant separate
>> >> distribution.
>> >
>> > You can put several packages in a single distribution.
>>
>> Thats not the point though. Due to compatibility issues, maybe I don't
>> want to expose the code at the top level. Maybe the foo package is
>> distributed elsewhere as a top-level package, but I need to use an
>> older version due to compatibility problems. I certainly don't want to
>> risk overwriting a pre-existing installation of foo with my required
>> version of foo. This is not a hypothetical, we once had exactly this
>> problem when we distributed an old version of enthought.traits with
>> matplotlib
>
> That use case requires that the third-party package, not your package,
> use relative imports. I don't think you can require other projects to
> follow your coding style recommendations (unless of course you maintain
> both).

I'm not talking about requiring other projects to follow my coding style.

> I'm not sure I understand the issue.

The issue is implementing a PEP with nice support for relative
imports, and then documenting that it should never be used.

Darren