[Feature Request] Specify module name instead of filename

[furechan]

Just been using this a while so it might already be possible but I couldn't find it anywhere ...

I'd like to run pydeps on some of my installed modules by specifying a module name instead of a file/folder name.

I suggest to add a flag like -m or --module to specify a module name instead of a file name. pydeps can use importlib.util.find_spec to locate the module and use this as filename.

Thanks for the great software!

[thebjorn]

Is this just convenience functionality to not need to find the location of a module, or is there something special about modules found with find_spec?

[furechan]

Hi, yes it is mostly a convenience. If you have lots of packages installed, some editable some not editable, depending on which env, etc it can be a lot of work to seek them in the folder tree. Also if you want to automate some sort of reporting, it makes sense to have a central place to call pydeps independently of the location of the various project worspaces. I could create a custom wrapper around pydeps but I thought it'd more practical to have this builtin ... Thank You

[Hnasar]

Passing the filename can cause pydeps to incorrectly resolve imports.

If you have modules like:

a.b
a.c
c

and a/b.py has import c

then passing pydeps a/b.py --show-deps will show that import c is resolved to a/c.py which is incorrect. (If a/b.py were to import a/c.py then it would need to do either import a.c or from . import c OR a/b.py must be run as a script (so that pythona adds a/ to sys.path)

But if we were able to run pydeps -m a.b then pydeps ought to know not to resolve import c to a/c.py.

edit: Oh I guess it resolves differently if a is a namespace package (i.e. if a/__init__.py exists or not)

[thebjorn]

Python seems to think that a/c.py is correct, ie.:

\tmp\pydeps199\src> yamldirs .
.:
  __init__.py: ''
  a:
    __init__.py: ''
    b.py: |
      print('a/b.py')
      import c
    c.py: print('a/c.py')
  c.py: print('/c.py')

Python:

\tmp\pydeps199\src> py -3.12 a\b.py
a/b.py
a/c.py

You might be running into the difference in import-behavior between scripts and imports..?