Sorry to follow up myself, I've finally used the execfile approach, passing an empty dict for capturing locals and then just processing it:
new_settings = {} execfile(self.SETTINGS_MODULE, new_settings) # returns its locals in new_settings # assign UPPER_CASE vars for setting in new_settings.keys(): setting_value = new_settings[setting] # do what you want with the vars It looks like a better solution than polluting the namespace and allows to use any file as a config file withou the need to have it on sys.path. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list