Relative import management

[noirbizarre]

This topic has always been a bit painful to manage with isort or absolufy-imports and given I am migrating all my project to ruff I would love to be able to tune the relative imports ahndling:

• basic case (the one I use everyday): force relative imports for siblings and children only (with auto-fix support) (ie. .. starting imports)
• allow parent imports on a package basis: mark a package to be allowed as a relative-root reference by children packages/modules
• default: prevent relative

Is it something acceptable ?

Note: I am motivated enough to contribute but not yet skilled enough in Rust to make this happen soon

[charliermarsh]

Yeah, I think so... Right now, we support the "forbid relative imports of parent modules" rule from flake8-tidy-imports. But adding autofix to that rule would probably mean converting relative to absolute imports (basically points 2 and 3 on your list: prevent relative imports, rewrite them as absolute). So in addition, we'd need a new rule that's basically the inverse: prevent absolute imports in certain cases (with autofix).

Does that sound right?

Is there any tool or combination of tools you use today to enforce this?

[noirbizarre]

I think the autofix should be both ways for case 1:

• rewrite relative to absolute imports for the forbidden cases
• rewrite absolute to relative imports for siblings and children packages

For this case I am using absolufy-import with --never option but it is far from perfect and I have a lot of manual fixes to handle.

For case 3: This one should be the default: forbid relative imports and rewrite them as absolute as autofix. This is basically the deault behavior of absolufy-imports

Case 2 is bonus to me but I have some cases of child-to-parent dependencies I want to keep relative. The idea it to flag a package as relative-root for its children using by-package Ruff config syntax and then autofix should:

• Apply the same autofix as case 1 for siblings
• rewrite absolute imports to relative for children referencing this flagged parent (this is the point differing from case 1)
• keep/rewrite imports as absolute for those not matching this case

I took a look at flake8-tidy-imports: it is very close to the expected behavior but:

• cannot enforce relative/sibling imports
• does not autofix

[sbrugman]

Note that flake8-tidy-imports now has partial autofix

[lsorber]

Which cases are not covered by the flake8-tidy-imports autofix @sbrugman?

[noirbizarre]

I submitted a PR for my missing case as well as a matching one on flake8-tidy-import. I will adapt the PR depending on the review and feedback on the flake8-tidy-import repository.

[pawamoy]

Sorry if this is not the right place to ask: the docs (https://docs.astral.sh/ruff/rules/relative-imports/) say that

Fix is sometimes available.

When is that autofix available exactly? I'm looking at automatically converting relative imports to absolute ones. I have the relevant rule enabled:

[flake8-tidy-imports]
ban-relative-imports = "all"

Is such an autofix planned/accepted in Ruff?