All of the QAPI include statements are changed to be package-aware, as
explicit relative imports.
A quirk of Python packages is that the name of the package exists only
*outside* of the package. This means that to a module inside of the qapi
folder, there is inherently no such thing as the "qapi" package. The
reason these imports work is because the "qapi" package exists in the
context of the caller -- the execution shim, where sys.path includes a
directory that has a 'qapi' folder in it.
When we write "from qapi import sibling", we are NOT referencing the folder
'qapi', but rather "any package named qapi in sys.path". If you should
so happen to have a 'qapi' package in your path, it will use *that*
package.
When we write "from .sibling import foo", we always reference explicitly
our sibling module; guaranteeing consistency in *where* we are importing
these modules from.
This can be useful when working with virtual environments and packages
in development mode. In development mode, a package is installed as a
series of symlinks that forwards to your same source files. The problem
arises because code quality checkers will follow "import qapi.x" to the
"installed" version instead of the sibling file and -- even though they
are the same file -- they have different module paths, and this causes
cyclic import problems, false positive type mismatch errors, and more.
It can also be useful when dealing with hierarchical packages, e.g. if
we allow qemu.core.qmp, qemu.qapi.parser, etc.
Signed-off-by: John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Cleber Rosa <crosa@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <20201009161558.107041-6-jsnow@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
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