A pointer for people who keep referring to this bug -- after
discussions, the following idiom was selected as the "official" way to
import modules by name in 2.x (as seen in latest 2.x docs
http://docs.python.org/dev/library/functions.html#__import__ ).

---

If you simply want to import a module (potentially within a package) by
name, you can get it from sys.modules:

>>> import sys
>>> name = 'foo.bar.baz'
>>> __import__(name)
<module 'foo' from ...>
>>> baz = sys.modules[name]
>>> baz
<module 'foo.bar.baz' from ...>