Is this expected?  It was very confusing when I cloned a repo that didn't have the __init__.py there when I had just made it, but of course git doesn't track files, only directories.  I had accidentaly done mkdir instead of touch.

$ mkdir pkg/__init__.py
$ touch pkg/foobar.py
$ python
Python 3.4.1 (default, May 19 2014, 17:23:49) 
[GCC 4.9.0 20140507 (prerelease)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from pkg import foobar
>>> foobar
<module 'pkg.foobar' from '/home/abraithwaite/pkg/foobar.py'>
>>>

> but of course git doesn't track files, only directories.

but of course git doesn't track *directories*, only *files*.

> Is this expected? 

It is a little weird but usually problematic.  The cause that import checks for the existence of '__init__.py' but doesn't then add isfile() or  isdir() check which would be unnecessary 99.9% of the time.

I classify this a harmless oddity.

I think this is related to PEP 420.

    $ tree pkg/
    pkg/
    ├── foobar.py

    $ python3.2 -c "from pkg import foobar"
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
    ImportError: No module named pkg

But, with Python 3.3 and newer:

    $ python3.3 -c "from pkg import foobar"
    hello

See https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.3.html#pep-420-implicit-namespace-packages for the whatsnew entry.

Interesting.  I saw the same behavior on 2.7.7 as well:

$ python2
Python 2.7.7 (default, Jun  3 2014, 01:46:20) 
[GCC 4.9.0 20140521 (prerelease)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from pkg import foobar
>>> foobar
<module 'pkg.foobar' from 'pkg/foobar.py'>
>>> 

Anyways, it doesn't bother me too much.  I opened a ticket because I couldn't find an already open bug about it or any reference to it on google (although the keywords aren't great for google searches).

Cheers!

See also the issue #7732.

I remember that I added an check in Python 3.2 on the file type to explicitly reject directories:
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/125887a41a6f

+            if (stat(buf, &statbuf) == 0 && S_ISDIR(statbuf.st_mode))
+                /* it's a directory */
+                fp = NULL;
+            else

I wrote this change in the C code, I didn't report the change to the Python code (importlib).

A huge work was also done in importlib to reduce the number of calls to stat(). So maybe a check was dropped by mistake?

> So maybe a check was dropped by mistake?

Why do we care?  For the most part, Linux treats directories as files (if I do a mkdir twice, the error is "mkdir: tmp: File exists".  We don't care about the other flags rwx so why should we care about d?

Python should avoid adding superfluous checks when it doesn't have to.

> Anyways, it doesn't bother me too much.

AFAICT, it hasn't bothered anyone.

I agree, closing.