Question

I have a package 3rd party open source package “foo”; that is in beta phase and I want to tweak it to my requirements. So I don’t want to get it installed in /usr/local/lib/python or anywhere in current sys.path as I can’t make frequent changes in top level packages.

foo/
   __init__.py
   fmod1.py
       import foo.mod2
   fmod2.py
       pass

I want to install the the package “foo” as a sub package of my namespace say “team.my_pkg”. So that the “fullname” of the package becomes “team.my_pkg.foo” without changing the code in inner modules that refer “team.my_pkg.foo” as “foo”.

team/
    __init__.py
    my_pkg/
        __init__.py
        foo/
           fmod1.py
               import foo.mod2
           fmod2.py
               pass

One way to do this is to do this in team.my_pkg.init.py:

import os.path
import sys
sys.path.append(os.path.dirname(__file__))

But I think it is very unsafe. I hope there is some way that only fmod1.py and fmod2.py can call “foo” by its short name everything else should use its complete name “team.my_pkg.foo”

I mean this should fail outside team/my_pkg/foo:

import team.my_pkg
import foo

But this should succeed outside team/my_pkg/foo:

import team.my_pkg.foo

Answer 1

So I don't want to get it installed in /usr/local/lib/python or anywhere in current sys.path as I can't make frequent changes in top level packages.

What is wrong with:

python setup.py develop