[Python-Dev] Why does PEP 8 advise against explicit relative imports?

[Terry Reedy]

On 7/16/2013 7:40 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> PEP 8 advises developers to use absolute imports rather than explicit
> relative imports.
>
> Why? Using absolute imports couple the internal implementation of a
> package to its public name - you can't just change the top level
> directory name any more, you have to go through and change all the
> absolute imports as well. You also can't easily vendor a package that
> uses absolute imports inside another project either, since all the
> absolute imports will break.
>
> What's the *concrete* benefit of using absolute imports that overcomes
> these significant shortcomings in maintainability and composability?

 From my viewpoint, absolute imports always work, on all python 
versions, whereas people have reported various problems with relative 
imports on python-list. At least some of the complaints were valid, at 
least at the time, but I have not paid too much attention.

Even if idlelib files used relative imports, 'idlelib' cannot change and 
I see no reason to ever change 'idle_test'. I would like to change 
camelCaseFileNames.py, but if ever done, that would affect both types of 
imports.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy