Python generator produces unnecessary imports to __init__.py

[fingon]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

In Python, speed of imports of larger codebases is quite crucial. Therefore, minimising the number of imports makes sense. Currently the generated Python code includes every sub-module in the __init__.py (for both main module, as well as api/ and models/) sub directories).

Describe the solution you'd like

The extra imports should be an option (if we want to be backwards compatible, by default on).

Describe alternatives you've considered

My current alternative is horrifying - post-processor step which does:

	echo > X/openapi_client/__init__.py
	echo > X/openapi_client/api/__init__.py
	echo > X/openapi_client/models/__init__.py

(where X is where I'm generating them)

Additional context

By doing ^ the import speed for tools which e.g. import ApiClient and use only one API over doubled. This is for project with few api/models to boot - with more, it gets even faster (in relation).

[lawrence-witt]

This issue has almost rendered the library unusable for our team's use case targeting resource-restricted environments. We have overridden the templates for __init__.py using the templateDir feature provided by openapi-generator config but this still feels like a hack. Even still we are unable to override models/__init__.py because the current implementation for ApiClient seems to depend on the models package exporting its entire contents.

[spacether]

We are running into this issue also in environments where some libraries are allowlisted or denied via temporal.
Being able to import only specific models without running other init import tooling would solve our problem and unfortunately requires template modification.

An older python generator used to have this feature where the models __init__.py file did not import all the models
https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator/blob/cc2dc65496d4d75b5408a08237d96d9221773766/samples/openapi3/client/petstore/python/petstore_api/model/__init__.py
Which had the comment:

# do not import all models into this module because that uses a lot of memory and stack frames
# if you need the ability to import all models from one package, import them with
# from petstore_api.models import ModelA, ModelB

It appears that this feature was lost when the new python generator was introduced. The new generator supports lazy imports but that does not solve this general init running code problem.

• the prior python generator also did not run init code at the root of the apis module

Could the feature be added back in?