Why is django's settings object a LazyObject?

Question

Looking in django.conf I noticed that settings are implemented like this:

class LazySettings(LazyObject):     
...

What is the rationale be

Answer 1

I think that the purpose is to simplify settings from a developers point of view. So each project can have its own settings.py file without having the need to define all other Django settings as well. The LazySettings wrapper kind of combines everything from Django global_settings.py and your local settings. It lets the developer decide what settings he wants to overwrite, which he want to keep the defaults or which he wants to add.

The LazySettings class is maybe a wrong name for this, because I think it is not really lazy. Once you do something like from django.conf import settings the whole settings object is in your scope.