Use of relative imports or not ?

[davidwaroquiers]

In the end, we should decide whether we use relative imports in the relevant places (e.g. when we are in atomate/abinit/..., just do something like from .fireworks import scf_fw).

Pros: more concise
Cons: less clear => sometimes difficult to know from where something is imported

[ml-evs]

I think this is best handled on a case-by-case basis depending on the submodule that is doing the importing.

If it is library code that is going to be used as-is, e.g. core classes/data, then I think relative imports are preferable if the import is from within the same module. I personally prefer to stay away from e.g. from ..fireworks import scf_fw.

If it is code that could be used as a template, e.g. a user might want to create their own custom SCF workflow using the existing one as a starting point, then absolute imports are better as the code can just be reused directly. I'm not sure how common this use-case is for atomate.

[utf]

I would suggest going for absolute imports. I can imagine we will have a number of similarly named modules for vasp/abinit/other codes. I.e.,

atomate.common.powerups...
atomate.vasp.powerups...
atomate.abinit.powerups...

Having the full path will remove any ambiguity and avoid code such as:

from .powerups import xyz
from ..common.powerups import xyz