Per Eric Snow's research, this changed in Python 2.4 in changeset 331e60d8ce,
but these docs were not updated.

Patch by Peter Viktorin.

load_module().

Can't figure out what the other issue was for the importlib
changes.  Did find a small typo in the reload doc, though.

import and not *an* implementation.

The function is also moved to importlib.util.

And a news item rephrase.

old methods now provide implementations when PEP 451 APIs are present.

This should help with backwards-compatibility with code which has not
been updated to work with PEP 451.

parent packages automatically.

importlib.machinery.FileFinder.

While originally moved to stop special-casing '' as PathFinder farther
up the typical call chain now uses the cwd in the instance of '', it
was deemed an unnecessary risk to breaking subclasses of FileFinder to
take the special-casing out.

and stop importlib.machinery.FileFinder treating '' as '.'.

Previous PathFinder transformed '' into '.' which led to __file__ for
modules imported from the cwd to always be relative paths. This meant
the values of the attribute were wrong as soon as the cwd changed.
This change now means that as long as the site module is run (which
makes all entries in sys.path absolute) then all values for __file__
will also be absolute unless it's for __main__ when specified by file
path in a relative way (modules imported by runpy will have an
absolute path).

Now that PathFinder is no longer treating '' as '.' it only makes
sense for FileFinder to stop doing so as well. Now no transformation
is performed for the directory given to the __init__ method.

Thanks to Madison May for the initial patch.

The helper function makes it easier to implement
imoprtlib.abc.InspectLoader.get_source() by making that function
require just the raw bytes for source code and handling all other
details.

deprecation of imp.get_magic().

implementing in code) the deprecation of imp.reload().

Thanks to Berker Peksag for the patch.

importlib.abc.Loader.init_module_attrs() and implement
importlib.abc.InspectLoader.load_module().

The importlib.abc.Loader.init_module_attrs() method sets the various
attributes on the module being loaded. It is done unconditionally to
support reloading. Typically people used
importlib.util.module_for_loader, but since that's a decorator there
was no way to override it's actions, so init_module_attrs() came into
existence to allow for overriding. This is also why module_for_loader
is now pending deprecation (having its other use replaced by
importlib.util.module_to_load).

All of this allowed for importlib.abc.InspectLoader.load_module() to
be implemented. At this point you can now implement a loader with
nothing more than get_code() (which only requires get_source();
package support requires is_package()). Thanks to init_module_attrs()
the implementation of load_module() is basically a context manager
containing 2 methods calls, a call to exec(), and a return statement.

control whether to reset the module's __name__ attribute in case a
reload is being done.

explains better what the context manager is providing.