Enable the use of preferred-modules with submodules

[d33bs]

Current problem

When using the prefered-modules configuration extension there doesn't appear to be a way to specify submodules. Adding this capability would allow for greater specificity with this functionality and potentially avoid custom checker implementations.

Desired solution

For example, if we wanted to encourage the use of pathlib instead of os.path for filesystem operations without triggering warnings for os more broadly, one could use something like the following configuration line within their .pylintrc file:

preferred-modules=(os.path,pathlib)

Additional context

No response

[e-gebes]

I also wanted to use the feature for "deprecating" os.path in favor of pathlib.

I found out that there is a warning, but only when the import is import os.path, and not only import os. So, when a package has an implicit package/submodule import, it will not work reliably because in the code base there are often just the bare import os statements. There is apparently no checking of os.path.<func> usage, only checking of the import statement.

The same is with deprecated-modules=os.path, which works in my case only when the import statement imports that module explicitly.

An improvement for the feature would need to check usages, I don't know if this is feasible.