Imports in my first package

[cuppajoeman]

Hi there, I have just created my first package and I'm testing it out before I upload it to pypi. As I was testing it I ran into an issue, fixed it, but didn't understand how it fixes it. I'm hoping to get some help understanding what the problem was.

Here is the source code: https://gitlab.com/cuppajoeman/numuse

I am running python 3.9 - my os is linux

First I installed my package from testpypi in a venv and imported everything from one of the modules at the top of a file graph.py like this:

from numuse.converters import *

and after running python graph.py - I get the following error:

py  File "/home/ccn/music/graph_music/graph.py", line 4, in <module>
    from numuse.converters import *z
  File "/home/ccn/music/graph_music/numuse-venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/numuse/converters.py", line 1, in <module>
    from tools import ranged_modulus_operator
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'tools'

So I went and took a look at the file giving the error:

(numuse-venv) [ccn@sy337b4 graph_music]$ head numuse-venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/numuse/converters.py
from tools import ranged_modulus_operator
import re
import pprint
from typing import Tuple, Set, List, Optional
from fractions import Fraction
from notation import RootedIntervalCollection, NoteCollection

where I was able to see that the import from tools must be failing, which I found odd because in that very same folder we have tools.py:

(numuse-venv) [ccn@sy337b4 graph_music]$ ls numuse-venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/numuse/
constants.py  converters.py  __init__.py  musical_system.py  music.py  notation.py  __pycache__  tools.py

I asked someone and they recommended adding a dot in front of the module, so that I would instead have the line from .tools import ranged_modulus_operator. This fixed that error - and I had to do that in a few different locations before everything ran just fine.

I read around a little bit, and it seems like in general relative imports are more fragile then absolute ones: https://softwareengineering.stackexchang...-in-python

So I'm not 100% satified with the solution

If someone can explain why these errors occured, and what a proper fix might be, please let me know.

Best,
C

[snippsat]

Can look this post for some examples.
See in this example how top level __init__.py is used to lift sub-modules and bind package together.
This mean that can have simple import import my_makehtml now have attribute access to all in package.

A good example in of this Requests see that import is simple import requests and you have attribute access to all useful stuff in package.
Here a example where import could be simpler for users.

from matplotlib.backends.backend_qt4agg import FigureCanvasQTAgg as FigureCanvas
from matplotlib.backends.backend_qt5agg import NavigationToolbar2QT as NavigationToolbar

from numuse.converters import *

Never use import * at all,it's always bad.