Let me take the opposite standpoint here and play the devil's advocate. > users of the library can call "httpclient.sslsocket" and "httpclient.hlib" as if they

Let me take the opposite standpoint here and play the devil's advocate. > users of the library can call "httpclient.sslsocket" and "httpclient.hlib" as if they were provided by the library Well, they obviously shouldn't. And maybe they also shouldn't write Python code to begin with because, clearly, they're not able to adhere to Python conventions. Besides, why do you as the library developer care so much about what the users of the library do? If they don't follow your API specifications (proper API documentation should tell the users what they should and shouldn't do), it's their fault. I mean, people can and will shoot themselves in the foot all the time and in various ways. There's is nothing you can do about it. > which doesn't always work as expected when paths are hot patched as above. There is a reason why hot patching (and, by implication, mocking) needs to be done with care and only if you fully understand the consequences. Regarding issues with mocking specifically, I suppose you're referring to nasty questions like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14341689/how-to-mock-using-patch-relative-paths/ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14341689/how-to-mock-usi... ? Again, these things need to be done with care. (And of course the code also needs to be written in a testable way – no surprise here – and mocking should be done only if you've exhausted all other options.) > It's not always clear what was the exact issue, except side effects due to imports. Like you I am a Pythonista but I have honestly never run into any problems with selective imports (`from X import Y`) or import renaming (`import X as Y`) and much less even know what problems you're talking about. Overall, I find Python's way of importing modules rather straight-forward. (That is, as long as PYTHONPATH and __name__ are set correctly. From my POV, this is the only seriously annoying caveat.) Anyway, I'm very open to changing my opinion but I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific about the issues you're encountering so often. (If you really did encounter them so often, I would think you would have noticed a pattern by now? No offense.)