Many executables in python are meant to be run on python scripts, but can't run python scripts that are part of a package. For example, one can do `python -m pdb foo.py`, but not `python -m pdb package.foo`. This makes it more difficult to interact with executable scripts within a package. In particular, the following will NOT work in general: `python -m pdb package/foo.py`

It would be easier if these modules gained their own `-m` argument to specify import paths instead of files. For example, the third party coverage module does this, and can be run using the command `python -m coverage run -m package.foo`.

What follows is a small list of scripts present as modules in the Python stdlib that involve manipulating other scripts, and so could benefit from a -m option.

pdb
profile
doctest
trace
modulefinder
tabnanny
pyclbr
dis

In the case of pydoc, unittest (unittest discover, etc.) -- these are special cases, as they interpret input as either a path OR a module via guessing. There may not be any benefit to adding a -m option.

I think this is a reasonble idea, however there is no intrinsic relationship between these modules, so adding -m to each one should be a separate issue.  We can use this issue as a master and make the other issues dependencies of this one.

As a new feature any such changes would go into 3.4 at this time.

runpy needs to be refactored at least a bit before this will be practical. Issue 9325 is an existing issue for the same idea that discusses some of the problems to be resolved (it's a good idea, just a fair bit of work).