DeprecationWarning: the imp module is deprecated in favour of importlib

[cfv-project]

DeprecationWarning: the imp module is deprecated in favour of importlib

[lxp]

From what I can tell it is used by the old test harness. It can run all tests inside one Python process or spawn a new Python processes for each test.
Whenever cfv needs to be called it uses this wrapper script: https://github.com/cfv-project/cfv/blob/779d30f3aa0c6f4cb77b694823db64a0a89200af/test/cfv
It modifies the sys.path variable, so that it executes the cfv version from the directory instead of running a system-wide installation:

cfv/test/cfv

Line 6 in 779d30f

sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__)), os.pardir, 'lib')))

According to the comment above the line you mentioned, imp.load_source is only used to ensue that sys.path is modified:

cfv/test/cfvtest.py

Line 204 in 779d30f

# This is so that the sys.path modification of the wrapper (if it has one) will be executed..

I am not really sure myself if this is still needed or was only required in older Python versions. At least the comment was added in 2006: 4cf1b20