Re:PEP 810 – Explicit lazy imports
by zahlman on Friday October 03, 2025 @05:44PM
(#45468158)
> Relative imports work by relative package path, which is not at all the same.
Exactly. This gives you the flexibility to distribute a complex package across multiple locations.
> Often when you run Python you don't even have a package path.
Any time you successfully import foo.bar, you necessarily have imported foo (because bar is an attribute of that object!), and therefore bar can `from . import` its siblings.
> Using `importlib` is a horrible hack that breaks basically all tooling. You very very obviously are not supposed to do that.
It is exactly as obvious (and true) that you are not "supposed to", in the exact same sense, directly specify where on disk the source code file you want to import is. After all, this constrains the import process to use a source code file. (Similarly if you specify a .pyc directly.) Your relative path doesn't necessarily make any sense after you have packaged and distributed your code and someone else has installed it. It definitely doesn't make any sense if you pack all your modules into a zipapp.
Exactly. This gives you the flexibility to distribute a complex package across multiple locations.
> Often when you run Python you don't even have a package path.
Any time you successfully import foo.bar, you necessarily have imported foo (because bar is an attribute of that object!), and therefore bar can `from . import` its siblings.
> Using `importlib` is a horrible hack that breaks basically all tooling. You very very obviously are not supposed to do that.
It is exactly as obvious (and true) that you are not "supposed to", in the exact same sense, directly specify where on disk the source code file you want to import is. After all, this constrains the import process to use a source code file. (Similarly if you specify a .pyc directly.) Your relative path doesn't necessarily make any sense after you have packaged and distributed your code and someone else has installed it. It definitely doesn't make any sense if you pack all your modules into a zipapp.