[python-committers] do we still believe explicit relative imports are bad as PEP 8 claims?

[Nick Coghlan]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> On Feb 18, 2011, at 12:36 PM, Brett Cannon wrote:
>
>>It says they are "highly discouraged" because "absolute imports are
>>more portable and usually more readable", but now that people have had
>>a chance to use explicit relative imports, do people still believe
>>this? I mean if we truly believed this then why did we add the syntax?
>>I know I have used it and love it, let alone that I don't buy the
>>portability argument.
>
> I agree with others that explicit relative imports should still be
> discouraged.  I've run into problems with them where imports break under some
> situations.  I don't remember the details, but I think it was when running
> unittests or under -m or something.  Yeah, I should file a bug next time I run
> into it.

/me points to PEP 366

Relative imports and __main__ modules inside packages did *not* play
nicely with each other at all for a while there.However, as far as I
am aware, the only time you get in trouble now is when you run scripts
inside packages directly (rather than via -m), but that causes trouble
for multiple reasons, not just broken relative imports. If there are
other cases that still have issues, I'd definitely like to hear about
them.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia