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Asked: 2026-05-11T00:17:02+00:00

I want to use git to allow me to work on several features in

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I want to use git to allow me to work on several features in a module I’m writing concurrently. I’m currently using SVN, with only one workspace, so I just have the workspace on my PYTHONPATH. I’m realizing this is less than ideal, so I was wondering if anyone could suggest a more ‘proper’ way of doing this.

Let me elaborate with a hypothetical situation: I say I have a module ‘eggs’, with sub-modules ‘foo’ and ‘bar’. Components in ‘bar’ use code in foo, so eggs/bar/a.py may ‘import eggs.foo’.

Say that ‘eggs’ is in a git repository. I want to try out some changes to ‘foo’, so I copy it. The problem is that ‘import eggs.foo’ in eggs/bar finds the original repository in the PYTHONPATH, so it ends up using the old ‘foo’ instead of my modified one.

How do I set myself up such that each copy of the module uses its own associated ‘foo’? Thanks.

edit- Thanks for the pointer to relative imports. I’ve read up on it and I can see how to apply it. One problem I’d have with using it is that I’ve built up a fairly large codebase, and I haven’t been too neat about it so most modules have a quick ‘self-test’ under if __name__ == '__main__':, which from what I’ve read does not play with relative imports:

The other solution I’ve been able to google up is to deliberately manipulate sys.path, which seems like an even worse hack. Are there any other possibilities?

edit – Thanks for the suggestions. I’d originally misunderstood git branches, so as pointed out branches are exactly what I want. Nonetheless, I hadn’t heard of relative imports before so thanks for that as well. I’ve learnt something new and may incorporate its use.

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  1. Maybe I’m not understanding correctly, but it seems that git would be the solution here, since git’s branches don’t need separate paths.

    Create a branch for each working version of your eggs module. Then when you checkout that branch, the entire module is changed to a state matching the version of your sub-module. You could then merge what you need back and forth between the branches.

    And as S.Lott pointed out, may a little refactoring couldn’t hurt either 😉

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