this patch add a parameter to ModuleFinder, to not
recurse when searching module.
This way, someone can compute the modules needed by a
specific file, without having to compute all other
imported module, which may take time for result that
are no t needed. 

With the current system, you cannot create a clean
graph of modules dependancy, since  they are all on the
same level.

This patch do not change the default behavior.

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Thomas are you the defacto maintainer of modulefinder?  Any
comments?

I have no time or interest in this patch, so unassigning.

Anyone interested in this or can it be closed?

Adding jvr and people interested in import machinery, per Misc/maintainers.rst

Michael, can you refresh your patch against the py3k branch? Please also generate a unified diff from the top level of the source distribution, as detailed in http://www.python.org/dev/patches/ The feature seems useful to me and the patch is straightforward. Tests and doc updates are needed; do you want to add them?

Mark, I think that feature requests are never closed just because they’re old; they have to be rejected, implemented or obsoleted. (Thank you for all your triage work.)

The generalist in me is inclined to suggest a "depth" parameter (with depth=1 equivalent to direct dependencies only, and depth = None meaning all dependencies), but I must admit I don't have a concrete use case for the extra generality. So the simpler, recurse/don't recurse approach is probably a better option (building a depth-limited search on top of the recursion flag wouldn't be difficult anyway).

Aside from missing docs and unit test updates, the idea seems sound.

Although I do find it a little concerning that there is no mention of sys.path_hooks or sys.meta_path in the modulefinder source code. I suspect this module only works correctly with vanilla filesystem based imports and can't handle anything imported via PEP 302.

The depth parameter idea sounds like YAGNI, so let’s stay with a recurse boolean :)

I applied the patch, added a test and found a bug.  Here’s my progress so far; someone can start from it to write more tests and fix the code.

I modernized modulefinder a bit in 1521d9837d16; here’s a refreshed patch.