PEP 8 says:

Put any relevant __all__ specification after the imports.

I don't remember why we wanted __all__ to go after imports.  I think we should relax that since other dunders can go before imports.

See related PYCQA issue: https://github.com/PyCQA/pycodestyle/issues/394

I think that it should be updated to specify that all dunders ('__all__', '__version__', '__author__', etc) should be placed after the module docstring and before any imports. See issue-27187-patch1.txt for a possible update.

I might also suggest that the entire "Version bookkeeping" section could be removed in this case, as it would be covered by my newly added dunder section.

I added a comment on a pull request related to this that shows some of the cases that we probably don't want to allow: https://github.com/PyCQA/pycodestyle/pull/523#issuecomment-223464775

New changeset cf8e888b9555 by Barry Warsaw in branch 'default':
Relax __all__ location.
https://hg.python.org/peps/rev/cf8e888b9555

Thanks for the patch!

The revised text says __dunder__ should appear before any imports, however __future__ imports must appear first for obvious reasons.  Does this need to be mentioned in the pep?

Good catch.

I'm uploading a new patch that addresses ``from __future__`` imports issue explicitly.

Thanks Ian.  I'm going to apply that, but rephrase it a bit.