On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 16:25, R. David Murray <report@bugs.python.org>wrote:

>
> R. David Murray <rdmurray@bitdance.com> added the comment:
>
> Oh, a bit of clarification: the call that creates the pyc file in both
> the "normal" case and the error case is a call to the normal import
> command (or __import__ in the test case). The call to import_module is a
> prereq to producing the bug, but it doesn't matter what module it
> imports (as long as it hasn't been previously imported).  The import
> that shows the behavior imports a TESTFN module in the test case.
>
> You might want to load up the test case and play with it.  I'm
> completely mystified as to how import_module could be affecting the
> regular import semantics...I'm guessing it is a subtle side effect of
> something unexpected ;)

It's beyond mystifying as both importlib.__import__ and
importlib.import_module are thin wrappers that do nothing but splice strings
for the same function that does the heavy lifting. But I will see if I ever
find time to work on this.