Python/Django is importing the wrong module (relative when it should be absolute)

Question

I'm using Django 1.2 pre-alpha and Python 2.4. Yeah, I know, but I'm stuck with it. We can't upgrade at the moment and I doubt that's the answer anyway.

I've got two template tag libraries, foo and bar. However, foo is also the name of a top-level package, and it happens to be the package of bar:

foo-1.2.3/
  foo/
    conf/
      settings.py
    templatetags/
      bar.py

bar-4.5/
  somepackage/
    templatetags/
      foo.py

The tag library bar.py contains a line like this:

from foo.conf import settings

...and you would expect it to load foo-1.2.3/foo/conf/settings.py.

But no:

TemplateSyntaxError: 'bar' is not a valid tag library: Could not load template library from django.templatetags.bar, No module named conf

Unfortunately, Django performs a little magic and binds all template tag libraries to django.templatetags.*. Thus, bar is being imported as django.templatetags.bar, and when it calls from foo.conf import settings it ends up importing bar-4.5/somepackage/templatetags/foo.py. Ugh!

Do you have any ideas how to fix this?

I've set a breakpoint right before the import, and I've confirmed that foo-1.2.3 is at the beginning of sys.path, but the import keyword still finds the wrong foo.

If it helps, note that I can modify the foo-1.2.3 package (because it's been checked in locally and is being phased out), but I refuse to modify the bar-4.5 package (because it's an open-source package and has been installed system-wide).

Answer 1

After a few more hours of hacking, this did the trick.

Original code:

from foo.conf import settings

New code:

foo = __import__('foo')
conf = __import__('foo.conf').conf
settings = __import__('foo.conf.settings').conf.settings

(I probably don't need the second line.)

Ewww.