Replace absolute imports with relative imports

[natezb]

I'd like to use 2.0 in a project of mine, but I rely on some packages that don't yet support it, so my intent is to temporarily bundle prompt_toolkit as a subpackage until these issues clear themselves up. When trying to do this, I discovered many absolute imports that could/should be rewritten as package-relative, e.g. in application.py.

Would you be willing to accept a PR that replaces the absolute imports of prompt_toolkit.x with relative imports? I'd stick to the library code and wouldn't touch examples/tests/etc.

[jonathanslenders]

Hi @natezb,
I understand your situation, but this would not be convenient for us. Very often, an import has to go several levels of directories up, which means that many imports will look like from ...something import .... That's not really readable and makes it hard in situations where code is moved around.
Have you any idea how other projects are solving this?

[natezb]

By "solving this" do you mean unreadable relative imports, or relying on prompt_toolkit >= 2.0? Either way I don't know.

Also, to clarify: when I wrote that I rely on packages that rely on 1.x, I meant that I personally rely on such packages, not that any of my project's dependencies do. For instance, I think the current version of Jupyter still uses 1.x.

I understand the readability issue, and the choice is ultimately yours. On my end, I already wrote up a script to rewrite the imports, and I'll probably push these import changes to my fork soon. My project is really just a small personal thing, so this isn't a huge issue for me and hopefully will resolve itself in not much time.

Ultimately the transition may have been smoother if there was a separate package prompt_toolkit2, but that ship has probably sailed at this point.

[jonathanslenders]

I meant using relative imports everywhere. Projects like Django for instance are not doing that.

Something like this one-liner should do it, I think:

grep 'from prompt_toolkit.' -R . --include=*.py -l | xargs sed -i 's/from prompt_toolkit/from yourpackage.prompt_toolkit/g'

If you have to copy prompt_toolkit into your source tree, then running one additional command should be fine, I'd think? Personally, I prefer adding some documentation / scripts about vendering prompt_toolkit over enforcing an import style. What do you think?

[natezb]

While I'd argue that using relative imports is the "correct" thing to do, I agree with you that it seems other large, well-established projects are getting along fine with absolute imports.

I also agree that adding docs/scripts concerning vendoring would be valuable, as I can't imagine I'm the only person who will run into this issue with the 1.0/2.0 split.

When I get the chance I can play around with that one-liner and let you know what tweaks need to be made, if any.

[alejandrogallo]

I'm glad I found this, since I intend to do the same with my project, I too intend to do it this way by
replacing all from ... with my package namespace. I hope in the future this is not broken too much @jonathanslenders , if you could have in mind people like us when you further develop that'd be great!
Thanks for your great lib!