So the problem is that you doing `from .a import test` and not `from . import a; test = a.test`. Whenever you do `from X import Y`, import actually imports X. Since X wasn't in sys.modules, it performs a proper import which means it sets the attribute on the package accordingly. But had Y been what you were after, then import simply looks for the Y attribute on the package instead of doing a full import.

IOW everything is working as expected (and I still wish people weren't allowed to import objects out of modules directly).