Question

When a module mod1.py and mod2.py exists in the same directory, I can import mod2 in mod1 directly as

import mod2

or relative with

from . import mod2

Is there any preferable way to do this?

I am asking because if mod1 is imported in mod2 as well, the relative import will not work.

Answer 1

Implicit relative imports are gone in Python 3. So clearly, they are deprecated, primarily because they collide with absolute imports (i.e. if there was a global module mod2, how would you import that?).

You are right that circular explicit relative imports don’t work; this is a bug. As a consequence, the preferable way is to avoid circular imports.