Half-rhetorical half-genuine; you know better than me the history of breakage
due to such changes, anyway. I can't really think of anything you haven't, so
I'll just sit back.
From: gu...@python.org
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2015 15:15:25 -0800
Subject: Re: [Python-Dev] Change the repr for datetime.timedelta (was Re:
Asynchronous context manager in a typical network server)
To: vgr...@live.ca
CC: ros...@gmail.com; python-dev@python.org
On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 3:05 PM, Emanuel Barry <vgr...@live.ca> wrote:
From: gu...@python.org
> I'm just curious on the backward compatibility impact.
I'm just curious on the number of programs depending on the repr() of any
object at all in production (not counting tests). I could be wrong, but it
seems foolish to rely on that, especially since this is something that we *can*
change on an (almost) arbitrary basis. IMO, the repr() is meant to aid the
programmer - not specifying keyword arguments here does quite the opposite of
that :)
Not sure if you meant that as a rhetorical question or sarcastically. While
you're right that ideally changing the repr() of an object shouldn't affect
production work, in practice it can break any number of things, for example
over-specified unit tests or poor integrations that end up parsing the string
(perhaps in a different language than Python).
We've encountered such issues many times in the past (for example, massive
doctest breakage when we randomized the string hash) so we have to at least
consider the possibility. In this case I expect there will be little effect,
but it doesn't hurt asking around -- who knows what someone reading this
remembers (besides asking pedantic questions :-).
--
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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