Nick Coghlan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> added the comment: This is actually a pretty tough problem - fixing it would involve some fairly subtle changes to the way imports from packages are handled. Given that I'm of the opinion that permitting circular imports in a code base is an extraordinarily bad coding practice (if I'm ever tempted to create a circular import, I consider it a sign that I need to separate out some of the common code into a utility module), I'm not personally going to be putting any effort into solving it (although I wouldn't necessarily oppose anyone else trying to fix it).
However, I'll give a detailed description of the problem and a possible solution in case anyone else wants to tackle it (since I believe there's already a similar trick done for the sys.modules cache). At the moment, when resolving an import chain __import__ only sets the parent package's attribute for the submodule after the submodule import is complete. This is what Jim describes in his original post, and is the cause of the failure to resolve the name. Deferring the lookups solves the problem because it means the package attributes are checked only after the whole import chain is complete, instead of trying to get access to a half-executed module during the import itself. The most likely solution to the problem would be to change the attribute on the parent package to be handled in a fashion closer to the way the sys.modules cache is handled: set the attribute on the parent package *before* executing the module's code, and delete that attribute if a problem is encountered with the import. The consequence of this would be that circular imports would be permitted, although the module's imported in this fashion would be seen in a half constructed state. So instead of the import failing with an exception (which is what happens now), you would instead get a module which you can't actually use (since most its attributes won't actually be filled in yet, as the circular imports will normally occur near the top of the file). Attempts to use methods, attributes and functions from the module may or may not work depending on the order in which the original module does things. A clean failure indicating "You have a circular import, get rid of it" seems better to me than possible hard to diagnose bugs due to being able to retrieve things from a half-constructed module, but opinions obviously differ on that. However, I really don't see this changing without a PEP. ---------- assignee: ncoghlan -> type: -> feature request ____________________________________ Tracker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://bugs.python.org/issue992389> ____________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
