Should we remove self-references?

[gigaj0ule]

I noticed that when I tried to run iPython's interactive shell as a local dependency

from . import ipython

A lot of the files in the program have self-references that expect ipython to be a global package. For example in interactiveShell.py...

from IPython.core.events import EventManager, available_events

But if we replace this with,

from ..core.events import EventManager, available_events

or

from .events import EventManager, available_events

the self-reference is eliminated, and we can import the library and it works without iPython being defined in the global namespace.

[Carreau]

I think that is a reasonable thing to do.

In general there is a long standing issue to try to remove anything that rely on global state in IPython so that for example a process can embed to IPython kernels or debugger.

It's just a lot of work, and none of the core dev have found time to move forward on this.

If you wan to update some of those and send a pull-request, we can see if the test are passing.

I'm also trying to do a monthly release so we can do only a couple of change every month and see how it affect users.

[gigaj0ule]

I tried doing this a bit last night before realizing that indeed there's going to be a lot to do.

It looks like there is a combination of low hanging fruit such as,
from Ipython import X
which is very easy to fix.

But there are a lot of references to iPython in various strings which might be harder depending on where those strings are executed.

When I have the free time to do it I will get started on a branch that at the very least gets rid of the low hanging fruit.

[Carreau]

When I have the free time to do it I will get started on a branch that at the very least gets rid of the low hanging fruit.

Thansk that would be great. Even if it's a single import, it's always a small step in the right direction.

[Carreau]

A bunch of the imports have been done in #11938 , I believe there is still some code that will rely on global IPython; so we may need some more fixes, so reopening.