> A key question here is why are you trying to avoid the AttributeError case so much?

> but there's a reason that we don't have attribute existence tests before every single attribute access throughout the test suite

Hmm, good point. I may have been fixating on avoiding exceptions within the tests a bit too much, perhaps the exception would be appropriate in this case.

> Basically unless the attribute is dynamic and thus you're explicitly testing the attribute got set then don't worry about it.

Ah, that answers my earlier question, thanks. (:

With an initial glance, do you have any specific ideas as to how test_pkg_import.py should be changed to utilize importlib directly? I've been reading through the docs looking for ideas, but I'll admit that I'm not particularly experienced with using importlib.