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[boris]

I have two directories, lib1 and lib2, that both contain the package
foo, one with the submodule mod1
and the other with the submodule mod2:

$ ls lib*/foo/
lib1/foo/:
__init__.py  __init__.pyc mod1.py      mod1.pyc

lib2/foo/:
__init__.py  __init__.pyc mod2.py      mod2.pyc
$

Now this script:

import sys
sys.path.append("lib1")
sys.path.append("lib2")
import foo.mod1

will find the module foo.mod1, while the same script with the two
append-lines interchanged will not:

import sys
sys.path.append("lib2")
sys.path.append("lib1")
import foo.mod1

The error is:

    import foo.mod1
ImportError: No module named mod1

So I guess that when Python finds the package foo, it will not look for
it again using the rest of
the search path, even if at that first place the module could not be
found.

Other languages like e.g. Java would find the module mod1 in the second
case too (if Java doesn't
find it in the first place, it will also look for it in the second
place).

This behaviour of Python is very unfortunate, because you always have
to merge your package
trees. In my cvs I have several packages, each in its own cvs module,
all starting with
de.science_computing. Now if I need two of them in a new project, I
will have two package trees
in my cvs sandbox, both starting with de.science_computing. Leaving the
sandbox that way, cvs
will work but Python imports will fail while if I merge all the package
trees, Python will work but cvs
won't.

My questions:
- Have I done anything wrong?
- If not, is this behaviour of Python a bug or intentional?
- If it it intentional, what is the intent?

Thank you for your help
Boris