Re: Eliminating implicit __main__ relative imports

On 28 March 2017 at 11:25, Nick Coghlan <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thanks to PEP 366, cross-version compatible main-relative imports
> would then look like:
>
>     if __package__ is not None:
>         from . import relative_module_name
>     else:
>         import relative_module_name

I'd be a little concerned that certain types of program (adhoc scripts
and the like that got too big to be a single file) would be broken by
this. Even if they *don't* care about cross-version compatibility,
they'd need to change from "import foo" to "from . import foo". I
honestly don't know how common this problem would be - I've tried to
think what programs I have that would be affected, and honestly, my
feeling is that it's either very few, or it's a lot but I use
main-relative imports so automatically that I can't remember any ;-)
(Although TBH, I think the former, based on the fact that most of my
adhoc scripts are very small).

The particular concern is that if it *is* an issue, it'd mostly hit
the sort of code that doesn't get published on the web, so it's
probably pretty hard to get a sense of the scale of the impact.

In isolation, though, the idea sounds good.

Paul