So after a few hours, I discovered the cause of a bug in my application. My app's source is structure like:

main/
    __init__.py
    folderA/
        __init__.py
        fileA.py
        fileB.py

Really, there are about 50 more files. But that's not the point. In main/__init__.py, I have this code: from folderA.fileA import *

in folderA/__init__.py I have this code:

sys.path.append(pathToFolderA)

in folderA/fileB.py I have this code:

from fileA import *

The problem is that fileA gets imported twice. However, I only want to import it once.

The obvious way to fix this (to me atleast) is to change certain paths from path to folderA.path

But I feel like Python should not even have this error in the first place. What other workarounds are there that don't require each file to know it's absolute location?