App name changes and is confusing to use across a project

[Michael]

I hope this is just a case of "you doing it wrong". This issue has been a thorn in my side for so long, and is an issue of constant confusion for me. So like many larger projects, my applications doesnt have all the django apps in the root folder. I created a framework as follows:

project_root

• core - contains essentials apps for the framework
• applib - contains apps that a certain deployment may or may not use
• dist - contains apps that are only used for a certain distribution

Now say there is app foo within core, then from experimentation (as in things don't work otherwise) one must set:

# Filename: project_root/core/foo/apps.py
from django.apps import AppConfig

class FooConfig(AppConfig):
    name = 'core.foo'  # I hope here I am doing it wrong, and this is the source of trouble

Okay great so the app name must include the dotted path from the project root, no problem. So now all the reverse(...) and {% url '...' %} use this dotted path app name.

Then say one has an issue of circular imports with models, so one must lazy import the model name. However it does not use the app name, it uses some other combination, after trying various ways turns out it must be in like this:

# Filename: applib/bar/models.py

class BarModel(models.Model):   
    foo = models.ForeignKey('foo.FooModel', on_delete=models.PROTECT, null=True, blank=True)

Notice how now the appname is 'foo', whereas most of the time it is 'core.foo'.
Additionally with migrations it uses this shorter app name. If one looks in the django_migration table and migration files, one sees 'foo' instead of 'core.foo' (which is what it was explicitly set to).

Is this not a bit confusing?