Status: Accepted
Owner: ----
Labels: Target-2.5.5 Type-Enhancement Priority-High
New issue 678 by pekka.klarck: Enable exposing only some of the functions
in a module as keywords with Python's `__all__` attribute
http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/issues/detail?id=678
Currently all functions/methods not starting with an underscore exposed as
keywords when a module is used as a library. This can cause problems such
as in issue 677. Prefixing all the helpers with an underscore isn't a very
nice general solution because you can easily forget to do that.
In my opinion the easiest solution for this problem is making it possible
to list what functions actually are keywords. If you use this feature, no
helper can ever be accidentally exposed as a keyword. A drawback is that
you need to remember list also all new keywords, but forgetting that is
easy to spot because the new keywords won't work otherwise. By default all
functions would be keywords just as it's done now.
We could use some special `ROBOT_XXX` attribute for this purpose, but
Python already has `__all__` which we even use with variable files.
Honoring `__all__` also when creating keywords is, in my opinion, logical
and also nicely solves the underlying problem.
