# copy this to test.py
# > touch foo.txt
# > python3.1 -c "import test; import collections"
# > ...
# >   File "test.py", line 5, in find_module
# >     def find_module(self, mname, path = None): open("foo.txt")
# >   File "test.py", line 5, in find_module
# >     def find_module(self, mname, path = None): open("foo.txt")
# >   File "test.py", line 5, in find_module
# >     def find_module(self, mname, path = None): open("foo.txt")
# >   File "test.py", line 5, in find_module
# >     def find_module(self, mname, path = None): open("foo.txt")
# > RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded while calling a
# > Python object
class importer(object):
  def find_module(self, mname, path = None): open("foo.txt")
import sys; sys.meta_path.append(importer)

***

# note recursion behavior stops if we don't call open()
class importer(object):
  def find_module(self, mname, path = None): pass
import sys; sys.meta_path.append(importer)

recursion also goes away if we open as raw bytes: open("foo.txt", "rb"). modes "r+" & "w" also give infinite recursion, while "rb+" & "wb" do not.

note found another bug:
instance method find_module should raise exception anyway, since its 
class was uninstantiated in sys.meta_path (proper behavior in python2.6)

First, the second bug isn't a bug since that restriction has been lifted
in Python 3.

The original issue occurs because open() for text modes imports the
"locale" module. This is kind of nasty, because calling open() is well
within what a find_module() implementation should be able to do. Antoine?

current hack-around, then is to pre-import locale, which is verified to 
work:

# beg test.py
class importer(object):
  def find_module(self, mname, path = None): open("foo.txt")
import sys, locale; sys.meta_path.append(importer)
import collections # no recursion
# end test.py

Yes, we conditionally import the "locale" module in order to guess the
encoding when it is not specified by the caller. We can't import it at
module initialization time because it would cause bootstrapping issues.

The Python equivalent of the logic expressed in C code in the _io module
can be found here:
http://code.python.org/hg/branches/py3k/file/51117227ac82/Lib/_pyio.py#l1410

Cannot reproduce with current 3.2 trunk, closing.