I would say it “required” it, but it would be helped. I also realize that top-level names are way easier to list accurately than submodules, hence my specific scoping.
I don’t need a 100% solution, but something better than assuming “package name == import name”.
Helping users resolve import errors. Consider a beginner that copied some code from the internet and they didn’t bother installing the appropriate dependencies. Anything we can do to help them solve that would be great. This ties into A look into workflow tools - package management in the Python extension for VS Code where we are trying to get things in VS Code so that beginners just have a better chance of succeeding and get them following good practices. So in this instance we could have a code action in VS Code that says, “install missing dependency from PyPI” which could provide a list of packages on PyPI that match that top-level name (which I suspect is usually of length 1, but if it’s more than they can pick the best fit). And if they find a package that seems to work and accept it we can then save the pinned version to a requirements.txt file (until we can install only dependencies from pyproject.toml), making their code easier to share.
I can also see this helping with code analysis where dependencies aren’t listed somewhere.