id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc
580	__path__ value is cached so __init__ files cannot change their own __path__ value	ikelos	giovannibajo	"Hi there,

In the course of developing volatility, we make use of a plugin mechanism [1] that sets the volatility.plugins.__path__ value to a list of directories from which plugins can be loaded.  These are later manually traversed and all imports made using __import__ [2].

When packaging up the most recent version using both 1.5.1 and the dev branch we found that changes made to the __path__ variable were not being seen, and delving within the code this appeared to be because the iu.ImportLoader caches the __path__ variable as part of the ImportDirector and therefore after the first import this never changed.

I've attached a patch below that appears to remedy the problem, but the internals of the loader are quite complex, and I had to use im_self to recover the object that needed updating.  As such any help/advice on this patch would be much appreciated...

[1] https://code.google.com/p/volatility/source/browse/trunk/volatility/plugins/__init__.py
[2] https://code.google.com/p/volatility/source/browse/trunk/volatility/registry.py#118"	defect	closed	normal	PyInstaller 2.1	Loader	develop	normal	fixed