[Python-markdown-discuss] Changes to make it easier to bundle markdown

[Toshio K. <a.b...@gm...>]

Hi,  I've been working on getting python-webhelpers copy of markdown updated
to a more recent version and found that the cyclic imports in the code were
making it hard to do so.  Would you take a patch to break the cyclic import?


The current cycles work like this:

  import markdown => imports (blockparser, blockprocessors, inlinparser, etc)
    => import markdown

When markdown is a subpackage, this fails:

  >>> from webhelpers import markdown
  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "webhelpers/markdown/__init__.py", line 161, in <module>
      import preprocessors
  File "webhelpers/markdown/preprocessors.py", line 11, in <module>
      import webhelpers.markdown as markdown
  AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'markdown'

Moving a portion of the code from markdown into some new files breaks the
cyclic import and allows this to work:

  import markdown => imports blockparser => imports misc

I have a patch here that seems to work:
http://gitorious.org/python-markdown/toshios-mainline/commit/b50560edc707241b236f9d6c3f33edcf09d7cf33

If the idea behind this seems acceptable, I'll propose it for merging.

-Toshio