[Python-Dev] package imports, sys.path and os.chdir()

[Christian Tismer]

On 27.04.12 22:00, Brett Cannon wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 10:39, Christian Tismer <tismer at stackless.com 
> <mailto:tismer at stackless.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 27.04.12 02:39, Nick Coghlan wrote:
>
>         On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 7:30 AM, Christian
>         Tismer<tismer at stackless.com <mailto:tismer at stackless.com>>  wrote:
>
>             No big deal and easy to work around, I just would like to
>             understand why.
>
>         I don't like it either and want to change it, but I'm also not
>         going
>         to mess with it until the importlib bootstrapping is fully
>         integrated
>         and stable.
>
>         For the moment, there's a workaround in runpy to ensure at least
>         __main__.__file__ is always absolute (even when using the -m
>         switch).
>         Longer term, I'd like to see __file__ and __path__ entries to be
>         guaranteed to be *always* absolutely, even when they're imported
>         relative to the current working directory.
>
>
>     Is there a recommendable way to fix this? I would like to tell people
>     what to do to make imports reliable. Either I put something into
>     the toplevel __init__ code, or I hack something into .pth or
>     sitecustomize,
>     and then forget about this.
>
>
> No, there isn't.
>
>     But I fear hacking __init__ is the only safe way that works without
>     a special python setup, which makes the whole reasoning rather
>     useless, because I can _not_ forget about this.... waah ;-)
>
>
> Yeah, to guarantee the semantics you are after you have to grab that 
> '' entry in sys.path as early as possible and substitute it with the 
> cwd so that its initial value propagates through the interpreter. 
> Importlib is already having to jump through some hoops to treat it as 
> '.' and even that doesn't get you what you want since that will change 
> when the cwd is moved.
>
> I'm personally in favour of changing the insertion of '' to sys.path 
> to inserting the cwd when the interpreter is launched.

Thanks Brett, that sounds pretty reasonable. '' always was too implicit 
for me.

cheers - chris

-- 
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