Note that django-admin startapp example os results in CommandError: 'os' conflicts with the name of an existing Python module and cannot be used as an app directory. Please try another directory.

But after this change it is allowed.
This is reverting much of ticket-30393, which is done because if you were to then add the app created in the os directory, this would break the project with ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'os.apps'; 'os' is not a package

Thanks for this! I've had a look more closely and the issue might be how manage.py and django-admin handles import checks. I think manage.py startapp causes a false CommandError if the target directory exists and sys.path thinks it's an importable module even if it is empty.

I'll change the patch to adjust this behaviour and correct the changes to the tests.

Note that django-admin startapp example os results in CommandError: 'os' conflicts with the name of an existing Python module and cannot be used as an app directory. Please try another directory.

But after this change it is allowed.

This is still true after the recent changes. What I would expect is:

• doing django-admin startapp example os or manage.py startapp example os should both be disallowed, even when there is an empty os directory in the project
• doing django-admin startapp example destination or manage.py startapp example destination should be allowed, creating the app in destination

I can't get this to ever quite work right. I think the core issue is with find_spec() treating an empty directory as an importable module. And since django-admin runs outside of any specific project it doesn't see it and allows the creation if it already exists but manage.py detects the empty directory and thinks its a module.

So i either have to run find_spec and its thinks an empty directory is a module or ignore the directory which skips the validation. Neither of which are good solutions because they cause a different problem with the command.