[Zope3-dev] Importing

[Jeffrey P Shell]

I'm getting a little confused about what we're all talking about 
here, so I'm going to try to fill in a real example based on what 
I'm working on today.

I have a fairly rich CMF based product (CMF chosen for it's 
component-model-like features more than any need for actual content 
management features).  As I noticed that the amount of modules was 
increasing dramatically, I broke the product out into sub-packages:

myproduct/base
myproduct/content
myproduct/interfaces
myproduct/tools
myproduct/workflow

base has some common base clases, so an import in 
content/contact.py looks like:

from Products.myproduct.base import FolderyContent
      ^^^^^^^^

I interpreted Chris Withers' original question to be about - what 
happens if that lead "Products" goes away?  It's something we're 
well used to having around.  How am I supposed to reference 
associated subpackages if it's not there?  Am I designing my code 
poorly?  Am I missing out on some undocumented __magic__ 
variable/attribute?  Or am I just confused about where this 
discussion has been / is going?

On Wednesday, December 12, 2001, at 05:49  AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

[SNIP]
>> well, if i have:
>>
>> /package1/
>> /package1/package2a/modulea
>> /package1/package2a/package2b/mobuleb
>>
>> ...then when package 2 is being used on its own, I could do the 
>> following in
>> moduleb:
>
> What do you mean by "on its own?".  I'm afraid that you mean that
> /package1 is on sys.path?  That's evil!
>
>> from package2a.modulea import someclass
>>
>> However, as soon as package2a is installed as a sub-package of 
>> package1, then
>> I'd have to change that import statement to:
>>
>> from package1.package2a.modulea import someclass
>>
>> ...or am I missign something?
>
> No, we just disagree on the desirability of all this.  I think
> "fixing" this in Python would be wrong, and leading to more confusion
> (for the *reader*, it's hard enough to figure out where to look for
> modules without multiple levels of relative import).  But others have
> occasionally asked for this too.  We should make it a PEP and reject
> it for clarity.  (PEP 667 anyone?)
>
> --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
>
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Jeffrey P Shell, jeffrey@cuemedia.com