Hello,

recently I filed this bugreport to Django, but they clarified this by pointing me to commits for new version of Django that uses python builtin importlib (import_module)

But since most of their import_module code is done like [import_module(x) for y if blahblah], it is very difficult for me to debug code where Django tries to import some package, and all I get back is message "relative imports require the 'package' argument"

This message tells me exactly nothing :), just that something somewhere, even 3rd party app tried to do relative imports ...

what did it import, with what parameters?

I edited this locally for debugging, and changed it to this:
"relative imports require the 'package' argument, package: %s" % name

This simple change of the message allowed me to find the problem in a few seconds..

Would you please consider adding something similar to importlib for better debugging?

Thank you :)

It could be changed to something like "the 'package' argument is required to perform a relative import for {!r}".format(name) . Would that have made it more clear?

Yes, absolutely,

that is what was I needed to debug it easily, the name parameter

Thank you :)

Also, please do not forget on backports for python 2.6+ :)

Sorry, I can't backport this change as it's not a bugfix but an enhancement and it could break someone's code who relies on the specific format of the exception message.

New changeset 2294594fbe6c by Brett Cannon in branch 'default':
Closes issue #18598: Have the exception message for
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/2294594fbe6c