Using relative names in quickstarted templates

[Christoph Zwerschke]

It sometimes bothers me how often the package name of a TG project is
repeated in a controller module, both in import statements like "from
mylongpackagename.model import MyModelClass" and in expose decorators
like @expose("mylongpackagename.templates.mypage").

So I thought about changing the quickstart templates to use relative
imports, but I found two problems:

1) Relative imports do not work for Genshi (generally dotted notation)
in @expose any more (they used to work in TG1), so we would first need
to add that feature back.

2) I read e.g. in PEP8 that relative imports are considered bad
practice, not only the old implicit relative imports (which is obvious),
but even the newer explicit relative imports. Unfortunately no rationale
is given, I can only guess that it's about "explicit better than
implicit" (since explicit relative imports are only explicit about being
relative, the location is still implicit). I'm not sure whether
"explicit better than implicit" overtrumps DRY here. And I don't
understand why explicit relative imports have been introduced in Python
2 and not been removed from Python 3 if they are really so bad.

Opinions?

-- Christoph

[Alessandro Molina]

While I generally agree that it is a slow down in writing code, I think that it has the positive effect of making really easy to extract parts of the application as pluggable apps as their templates already refer to a specific package. That provides a consistent behaviour between the templates you load inside your application and the template you load in partials or pluggable apps. 

At least if we consider .templates.something as APPPACKAGE.templates.something.

I would be more in favor of .templates.something being an alias to os.basedir(Controller.__module__.__file__)/templates/something but in that case we would break the assumption of TG apps having all their templates inside apppackage/templates

-- Christoph

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