[Python-ideas] Allow 'import star' with namespaces

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 7:04 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is one of the reasons circular imports are such a pain - we
> pre-bind them in sys.modules, and remove them again if the import
> fails, but we don't currently do that in the parent package namespace,
> so circular imports sometimes work and sometime break depending not
> only on which names are accessed but also *how* they're accessed (e.g.
> in a/b/c.py, "import a.b.c" will work, "import a.b.c; c = a.b.c" will
> fail with AttributeError and "from a.b import c" will fail with
> ImportError).

Maybe that's something we could strive to fix?

> I can see a case being made to provide that as a function in pkgutil
> (or perhaps importlib itself), but I don't see any reason to give it
> dedicated syntax.

+1

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)