Patrick Maupin added the comment: The PEP 8 recommendation to "use absolute imports" is completely, totally, unambiguously meaningless absent the expectation that packages refer to parts of themselves. And it works, too! (For a single level of package.)
As soon as packages are nested, this recommendation falls over, with the most innocuous code: x/__init__.py: import x.y x/y/__init__.py: import x.y.z; x.y.z x/y/z/__init__.py: <empty> The ability to nest packages is an attractive nuisance from a programmer's perspective. He's neatly organized his code, and now he finds that there are two ways to make it work: (1) Use the disparaged relative imports; or (2) flatten his package to a single level, because importing X.Z from within X.Y will work fine. IMO, the language that Nick proposes for PEP 8 will either (a) not be understood at all by the frustrated junior programmer -- sure, the import system views it as a circular import, but he's not seeing it that way; or (b) be understood to expose a huge wart on the side of Python: Even though Z is only used by Y/__init__, and doesn't itself use anything else in Y, it cannot live alongside Y/__init__. Instead, unless Y is a top level module or the programmer uses denigrated relative imports, he will now have to move it to a different place, so that from Y he can then "import X.Y_HELPER.Z". Another PEP 8 prescription is that "Standard library code should avoid complex package layouts and always use absolute imports." Here's a serious offer -- I'll give $200 to whoever gets the patch accepted that makes lib2to3 conformant without breaking it. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue25294> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com