How do I avoid naming clashes within Python's module system?

Question

In my Django project I have an app called profile, which mostly contains my profile.models.UserProfile class for additional information on User objects (may seem familiar to Django folks). Now I've put some initialization code into profile/__init__.py (some signals) and have ran into a problem: Django tells me that a table called hotshot_profile has not been found.

After literally hours of searching, I traced the problem back to importing order. Running python -v manage.py test I've found the following:

import nose.plugins.prof # precompiled from /home/rassie/.virtualenvs/myproject/lib/python2.6/site-packages/nose/plugins/prof.pyc
import hotshot # directory /usr/lib64/python2.6/hotshot
import hotshot # precompiled from /usr/lib64/python2.6/hotshot/__init__.pyc
dlopen("/home/rassie/.virtualenvs/myproject/lib64/python2.6/lib-dynload/_hotshot.so", 2);
import _hotshot # dynamically loaded from /home/rassie/.virtualenvs/myproject/lib64/python2.6/lib-dynload/_hotshot.so
import hotshot.stats # from /usr/lib64/python2.6/hotshot/stats.py
import profile # directory /home/rassie/MyProject/apps/profile
import profile # precompiled from /home/rassie/MyProject/apps/profile/__init__.pyc

So my Nose runner imports the nose.plugins.prof (even though this plugin is off), imports hotshot, which tries to import profile. However, profile gets imported from my project, while it ready should have been imported from system Python.

Obviously, my own profile module clashes with system profile module. I obviously can't exclude every module name that comes bundled with Python from my own programming. So the question is, where do I go from here? Do I have to create a myproject namespace for all of my apps? Will Django work with that?

PS: Table's name hotshot_profile seems to come from a further yet-to-be-fully-analyzed naming clash with a Profile class from pybb, which I'm also using in my project. But that's out of this question's scope.

Answer 1

You should never import your own modules in the form import mymodule (relative imports). Instead you should always use import myproject.mymodule instead (absolute imports). This avoids all name clashes.