> I would like to propose that it be made impossible in the Python > source to import two instances of the same module.
A fully-automatic solution is more difficult than it might seem at first: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0328/ But there is a simple code-discipline solution: never ever use relative imports, even between code in the same package. We got "bit" by double-imports (a mix of relative, absolute, and even cross-imports A "import B" and B "import A") early on in one of our projects. The symptom was that the imported module would be initialized *twice*, once for a relative import and once for an absolute. This is not a happy situation for pseudo-singletons like the "logging" module --- esp. if one is hacking the internals! :-) We no longer use relative imports *EVER*, even within the same package. Perhaps Perforce is doing something tricky with scoping or importing, and you've just managed to stumble across this trickiness because of a double-import. Good luck, these things are a bugger to debug. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
