Hi, I have a package 3rd party open source package "foo"; that is in beta phase and I want to tweak it to my requirements. So I don't want to get it installed in /usr/local/lib/python or anywhere in current sys.path as I can't make frequent changes in top level packages. foo/ __init__.py fmod1.py import foo.mod2 fmod2.py pass I want to install the the package "foo" as a sub package of my namespace say "team.my_pkg". So that the "fullname" of the package becomes "team.my_pkg.foo" without changing the code in inner modules that refer "team.my_pkg.foo" as "foo". team/ __init__.py my_pkg/ __init__.py foo/ fmod1.py import foo.mod2 fmod2.py pass One way to do this is to do this in team.my_pkg.init.py: import os.path import sys sys.path.append(os.path.dirname(__file__)) But I think it is very unsafe. I hope there is some way that only fmod1.py and fmod2.py can call "foo" by its short name everything else should use its complete name "team.my_pkg.foo" I mean this should fail outside team/my_pkg/foo: import team.my_pkg import foo But this should succeed outside team/my_pkg/foo: import team.my_pkg.foo