[Python-Dev] relative import circular problem

PJ Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Apr 4 22:28:38 CEST 2013


On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> I don't really see what we could change to avoid breaking code in any
> particular case

Actually, the problem has *nothing* to do with circularity per se;
it's that "import a.b" and "from a import b" behave differently in
terms of how they obtain the module 'a.b'...

And "from a import b" will *always* fail if 'a.b' is part of a cycle
with the current module, whereas "import a.b" will *always* succeed.

The workaround is to tell people to always use "import a.b" in the
case of circular imports; it's practically a FAQ, at least to me.  ;-)

The problem with "from import" is that it always tries to
getattr(a,'b'), even if 'a.b' is in sys.modules.  In contrast, a plain
import will simply fetch a.b from sys.modules first.

In the case of a normal import, this is no problem, because a.b is set
to sys.modules['a.b'] at the end of the module loading process.  But
if the import is circular, then the module is in sys.modules['a.b'],
but *not* yet bound to a.b.  So the "from import" fails.

So, this is actually an implementation quirk that could be fixed in a
(somewhat) straightforward manner: by making "from a import b" succeed
if 'a.b' is in sys.modules, the same way "import a.b" does.  It would
require a little bit of discussion to hash out the exact way to do it,
but it could be done.


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