Relative import bug or not?

jUrner at arcor.de jUrner at arcor.de
Sat Oct 14 21:45:10 EDT 2006


Alexey Borzenkov wrote:
> After reading PEP-0328 I wanted to give relative imports a try:
>
> # somepkg/__init__.py
> <empty>
>
> # somepkg/test1.py
> from __future__ import absolute_import
> from . import test2
>
> if __name__ == "__main__":
>     print "Test"
>
> # somepkg/test2.py
> <empty>
>
> But it complaints:
> C:\1\somepkg>test1.py
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "C:\1\somepkg\test1.py", line 1, in <module>
>     from . import test2
> ValueError: Attempted relative import in non-package
>
> Does this mean that packages that implement self tests are not allowed
> to use relative import? Or is it just a bug? I can understand that I
> can use "import test2" when it's __main__, but when it's not now it
> complains about no module test2 with absolute_import on.
>
> PEP-0328 also has this phrase: "Relative imports use a module's
> __name__ attribute to determine that module's position in the package
> hierarchy. If the module's name does not contain any package
> information (e.g. it is set to '__main__') then relative imports are
> resolved as if the module were a top level module, regardless of where
> the module is actually located on the file system.", but maybe my
> english knowledge is not really good, because I can't understand what
> should actually happen here ("relative imports are resolved as if the
> module were a top level module")... :-/
>
> So is it a bug, or am I doing something wrong?


Short version is: relative imports do not work in 2.5 when a script is
run as "__main__"

Jürgen




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