I have a package named jiva_tasks, which I'm trying to import via celery (using the CELERY_IMPORTS attribute of celeryconfig. The import statement that celery is using is this:

__import__(module, [], [], [''])

Oddly enough, when this syntax is used, the module gets imported twice, once as jiva_tasks and another time as jiva_tasks. (with a period at the end). Now, chances are good that celery should be passing in globals rather than an empty list, but this seems broken to me. It seems odd that even if given the wrong arguments, __import__ would import something that isn't a valid python module name.

I know that the way to fix this is to pass in globals, but I want to understand why I'm getting this result. Is this a bug, or is there something I don't understand about how __import__ is working?

Update: It also seems to be working fine if I use importlib.