I feel this question needs a better title and I will amend it if someone suggests something better. The problem is I'm not sure of the terminology of the feature that I'm using here.
The best way to describe my problem is to show what I've done. The project is here: https://github.com/jeffnyman/quendor
This project is setup so it can be executed as a module. For example, from the project root someone could do this:
python3 -m quendor
I also have a build script to generate an in-memory zip (if I'm using that terminology correctly):
https://github.com/jeffnyman/quendor/blob/master/build.py
That works in that if you run build.py it will generate a quendor.py file that executes the entire project. That worked fine up until I included other directories (like my utilities and zinterface).
With the project as it is in the repo right now, if you run the build (.\build.py) and then run the generated file:
./quendor.py
You get the following error:
File "./quendor.py/quendor/__main__.py", line 6, in <module>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'quendor.zinterface'
So a key point: if all of my files are in the same directory (i.e., in quendor) this build script works fine in terms of producing an executable script file.
But once I include the subdirectories and files in those directories, things go south on me with the above error.
I'm sure all the files are being gathered. I handle that starting on line 18 (https://github.com/jeffnyman/quendor/blob/master/build.py#L18). And if you were to add to line 24 this statement:
print(f"* {file_path}")
You would see it outputs the following:
* quendor/__init__.py
* quendor/__version__.py
* quendor/zinterface/fileio.py
* quendor/utilities/messages.py
* quendor/__main__.py
So I'm suspecting it might have to do with the code where I write the string at line 28 (https://github.com/jeffnyman/quendor/blob/master/build.py#L28). I feel I have to do more to let the executable zipped script file know about the modules.
But I'm not sure if (1) I'm accurate and (2) even if I'm accurate, if that's possible. I'm finding I'm in a bit over my head here.
Any thoughts would be appreciated and I'm happy to update with any necessarily clarifications or terminology.
Actually, it turns out I found a way to do this! It required using os.walk rather than os.listdir. This required taking a few ideas that people here discussed. Here is the script that does the trick:
https://github.com/jeffnyman/quendor/blob/master/build.py
You can compare that with my previous commit that was trying to handle this a different way.
Eldritch was right that I couldn't just flatten the directory nor could I just add imports to the string I was writing to the final zip file. Jean-François was correct that I had to focus on the __main__.py that was being generated. My contribution was figuring out os.walk() and then parameterizing the written string to handle the different directories.
Finally, this solution does require, as per HTF's suggestion, that I put an empty __init__.py file in each package.
With my solution in place, you can run build.py which then generates the quendor.py script. That script then executes correctly, in terms of recognizing the imports to various packages.