Remote imports for Python?

To the compiler, import paths are opaque strings used for identifying a given module/package.

The 'go' build tool (roughly equivalent to what you would use CMake or whatever for in a C-based project) interprets them as file system references inside GOPATH and uses them to figure out what source files to pass to the compiler.

Only 'go get' tries to infer a remote location from them. What 'go get' does is let you say "clone this repo without making me figure out whether it uses Git, Mercurial or SVN and put it where the build system will pick it up". It's a convenience wrapper around VCS tools and is inherently targeted at developers, not users. You don't want to use it at deploy time.

Thus, Torakis' Go analogy is a bogus one.