Star (or wildcard) imports are one of the methods for importing libraries in Python, and although they are generally discouraged, they are rather prevalent in a lot of notebook-style scientific code. Within a package being imported, there is no official way of knowing whether this is by a star import, but since Python allows overriding just about everything, we can detect slight differences in the methods and inject arbitrary code if the wildcard is used.

In QuTiP, we currently suffer from long import times and want to move to a scipy-like style where fewer symbols are in the global package namespace, and submodules are only imported if explicitly requested. We want to issue a warning to people currently using the from qutip import * syntax, because the number of symbols available to them will soon decrease.