Patches item #1478993, was opened at 2006-04-29 09:43 Message generated for change (Comment added) made by nnorwitz You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=305470&aid=1478993&group_id=5470
Please note that this message will contain a full copy of the comment thread, including the initial issue submission, for this request, not just the latest update. Category: Library (Lib) Group: Python 2.5 Status: Open Resolution: None Priority: 5 Submitted By: John J Lee (jjlee) Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Summary: Take advantage of BaseException/Exception split in cookielib Initial Comment: The patch takes advantage of the exception hierarchy reorganisation to remove some ugly code in cookielib. It clarifies a couple of exception messages, too. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Comment By: Neal Norwitz (nnorwitz) Date: 2006-04-29 17:37 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=33168 John, at this point (2.x) we should at least do no worse. Don't export unnecessary vars in any new code. We should also start documenting the situation and work towards improving it. For 3k, we should do better and solidify the rules and do massive cleanup (module by module). This will probably involve some arm twisting of Guido. :-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: John J Lee (jjlee) Date: 2006-04-29 17:27 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=261020 I changed the exception detail strings to use %r to get quotes around the filename and quoted "bad" line read from the file. That makes it clearer what is part of the explanatory English text and what is part of the filename (or part of the quoted bad line, as the case may be). Filenames can and do contain spaces, commas, etc. Your other point stunned me a bit. I don't think it had ever even really *occurred* to me that stdlib users might consider stdlib module globals that are not documented as public. Ironically, I think that's because the code from which cookielib derives is much stricter about this, all modules starting with '_' and package __init__ exporting a short list of names -- I guess I thought I was following stdlib conventions by *not* adding initial underscores all over the place. Looking at some other stdlib code, I see that underscores would have been more conventional after all. Searching for reassurance, I discovered this from one of your old python-dev summaries that confirms that undocumented stdlib module globals are not considered part of the module public interface: http://www.python.org/dev/summary/2004-07-16_2004-07-31/#use-the-docs-to-know-what-the-public-api-is-people e.g. from Tim Peters: """ As you noted later, it wasn't part of keyword's documented interface, and you *always* act at your own risk when you go beyond the docs. """ However, I don't see that this is explicitly documented, which seems unfortunate to me (even though Tim's statement is true regardless of any convention Python might have). So, I guess I should: 1. Write something explicit about this (along the lines of "Use undocumented module globals at your own risk") for the stdlib library docs -- perhaps starting from Tim's post -- and submit that as a doc patch. 2. Leave all module global names in cookielib unchanged (so people using those functions don't suffer gratuitous breakage, even though any such people are asking for trouble in the long run). However, in the thread above, Michael Hudson disagrees with that, and suggests all such module globals be renamed. So suggestions are welcome here on the best course of action. 3. As you suggest, submit a patch to add an __all__ to cookielib. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Brett Cannon (bcannon) Date: 2006-04-29 14:12 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=357491 Overall the patch looks fine (on vacation so not up for applying and handling any possible failures so not going to assign to myself). But a question and a suggestion. Why were the error strings changed to use the repr instead of the string representation? What does it buy you? And if you are going to be changing the function name, you might want to consider using a leading underscore to prevent people from using it or getting exported. Otherwise I would define __all__ for the module. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=305470&aid=1478993&group_id=5470 _______________________________________________ Patches mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/patches
