Is it possible to use two Python packages with the same name?

Question

I have a question about imports. The question might seem a bit contrived, but its purpose is to explore the limitations of using absolute imports for all imports in a packa

Answer 1

My initial tests (in Python 2.6 & 3.1) suggest the following may work:

import sys, re

import foo as foo1
for k in sys.modules:
    if re.match(r'foo(\.|$)', k):
        newk = k.replace('foo', 'foo1', 1)
        sys.modules[newk] = sys.modules[k]
        # The following may or may not be a good idea
        #sys.modules[newk].__name__ = newk
        del sys.modules[k]

sys.path.insert(0, './python')
import foo as foo2
for k in sys.modules:
    if re.match(r'foo(\.|$)', k):
        newk = k.replace('foo', 'foo2', 1)
        sys.modules[newk] = sys.modules[k]
        # The following may or may not be a good idea
        #sys.modules[newk].__name__ = newk
        del sys.modules[k]

However, I only tested this against very simple packages and only tried it as a curiosity. One problem is it probably breaks reload. Python isn't really designed to handle multiple packages with the same top-level name.

At this point, I'm tentatively going to say that it's not possible in the general case, though it's possible under certain limited circumstances but it's very brittle.