support for hierarchical module naming schemes

@geimer: this should fix the problem that's blocking you right now

I might need to figure out one more thing w.r.t. the devel module name before this really works for you, I'm looking into that...
what does this do/try to achieve, since there's a reference to `ec` in the `easyconfig` dict? (in particular, why is there no `del easyconfig['ec']`?)