When or why to use relative imports in Python

Question

Is there any rules or guidelines concerning when to use relative imports in Python? I see them in use all the time like in the Flask web framework. When searching for this topic, I only see articles on how to use relative imports, but not why.

So is there some special benefit to using:

from . import x

rather than:

from package import x

Moreover, I noticed that on this SO question, the answer mentions that relative imports are discouraged. Yet people still continue to use them.

Answer 1

Check out PEP 328's section on relative imports

The rationale seems to be as written:

Several use cases were presented, the most important of which is being able to rearrange the structure of large packages without having to edit sub-packages. In addition, a module inside a package can't easily import itself without relative imports.