[pymvpa] Use of import *

[Michael Hanke]

Hi folks,

recently there have been a number of commits introducing 'import *'
statements and in addition removal of import statements, because the
respective modules were imported in other modules which in turn were
import with '*'. Now pylint is screaming desperately -- and after having
thought about it, I think it is right.

The previous way of explicitely importing every single piece with absolute
references gave each module a nice list of internal and external
dependencies. If we (re)move/named something we immediately noticed
what would break, by simple importing the module. All those 'import *'
kill this advantage. Now 'import *' would almost always succeed and we
rely on actually running *all* code to see what break. A proper unit
test battery somewhat deals with it, but IMHO we should not remove that
additional source of trust.

If you agree with my judgement, I would add a devguide snippet about it.

BTW: I'm not talking about mvpa.suite which is for interactive PyMVPA
and fine as it is.


Did I miss something?

Michael


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