importing same module more than once

So after a few hours, I discovered the cause of a bug in my application. My app's source is structured like:

main/
    __init__.py
    folderA/
        __init__.py
        fileA.py
        fileB.py

Really, there are about 50 more files. But that's not the point. In main/__init__.py, I have this code: from folderA.fileA import *

in folderA/__init__.py I have this code:

sys.path.append(pathToFolderA)

in folderA/fileB.py I have this code:

from fileA import *

The problem is that fileA gets imported twice. However, I only want to import it once.

The obvious way to fix this (to me atleast) is to change certain paths from path to folderA.path

But I feel like Python should not even have this error in the first place. What other workarounds are there that don't require each file to know its absolute location?

Don't modify sys.path this way, as it provides two ways (names) to access your modules, leading to your problem.

Use absolute or unambiguous-relative imports instead. (The ambiguous-relative imports can be used as a last resort with older Python versions.)

folderA/fileB.py

from main.folderA.fileA import *   # absolute
from .fileA import *               # unambiguous-relative
from fileA import *                # ambiguous-relative

Of course, you should be using specific names in place of that star.