Add Gazelle support for `importlib.import_module`?

[dougthor42]

🚀 feature request

Relevant Rules

• gazelle

Description

First off, I want to say that I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not. So feel free to shoot it down 🤣.

In #1931 (comment), it was said that the gazelle parser only needs to know about a subset of the python language:

• comments
• if __name__ == "__main__"
• from foo import bar
• import foo

However, there's another way to import other python code: importlib.import_module().

Should Gazelle parse these and attempt to add dependencies for them?

Issues

There are a couple pretty big issues with trying to do so:

1. In my experience, importlib.import_module is typically used as a way to work around circular dependencies. So having Gazelle parse them would just result in a broken build, probably frustrating users more than helping.
2. There's no way to figure out what the runtime value would be.
   • So we could anything that's a string constant:
     import_module("foo.bar.baz")
     but not
     module = input("Enter a module name: "); import_module(module) or even
     module = "foo.bar.baz"; import_module(module)

Benefits

Umm... I guess if import_module is used in a very specific way, then it would make making build files easier.

Describe the solution you'd like

N/A

Describe alternatives you've considered

Manually adding dependencies after running Gazelle. Not a big deal, IMO.

[aignas]

My thinking is that if somebody is using importlib and gazelle then they now what they are doing and the can use the feature from #1863.