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[Python-Dev] If you shadow a module in the standard library that IDLE depends on, bad things happen

Nathaniel Smith njs at pobox.com
Thu Oct 29 19:56:38 EDT 2015 
On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 1:50 PM, Ryan Gonzalez <rymg19 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why not just check the path of the imported modules and compare it with the
> Python library directory?

It works, but it requires that everyone who could run into this
problem carefully add some extra guard code to every stdlib import
statement, and in practice nobody will (or at least, not until after
they've already gotten bitten by this at least once... at which point
they no longer need it).

Given that AFAICT there's no reason this couldn't be part of the
default import system's functionality and "just work" for everyone, if
I were going to spend time on trying to fix this I'd probably target
that :-).

(I guess the trickiest bit would be to find an efficient and
maintainable way to check whether a given package name is present in
the stdlib.)

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org
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