Leaving the relationship between pickle and __name__ alone wasn't an oversight, as folks already rely on that to gracefully transition from single-file modules to multi-file packages without breaking pickle compatibility in either direction. The trick is to do a "from ._submodule import *" in the package's __init__.py (exposing all the names), and then a "__name__ = __package__" in the submodule itself.

Thus the second snippet above, as a way to port code that was specifically relying on the double import to provide pickle compatibility without risking introducing other unintended incompatibility problems.