Importing from within a package
In Python you can set your imports to be relative when inside a package - I just found that Python has had this capability since 2.5.
PEP 328 -- Imports: Multi-Line and Absolute/Relative
The example.
The gotcha: it does not work when running a module individually - in other words, you cannot have a test package as a child package and reference the parent package relatively. See "How to do relative imports in Python?" for more detail.