Issue 14075: argparse: unused method? (original) (raw)
Created on 2012-02-21 18:16 by tshepang, last changed 2022-04-11 14:57 by admin. This issue is now closed.
Messages (10)
Author: Tshepang Lekhonkhobe (tshepang) *
Date: 2012-02-21 18:16
It appears to me that the function I removed (see attached patch) is unused. Since I wasn't sure, I ran the entire test suite, and there wasn't a regression.
Author: Petri Lehtinen (petri.lehtinen) * 
Date: 2012-02-21 20:24
The _get_args() looks like an obsolete function indeed. However, _AttributeHolder is a base class for other classes, so the function was probably meant to be overridden by a subclass.
Steven probably knows the best whether it should be kept or not.
Author: Steven Bethard (bethard) *
Date: 2012-02-21 22:35
Yeah, the intention was that you could just override _get_args in a subclass to get a better repr. I think these days all the argparse classes only have keyword arguments, so _get_args probably isn't necessary anymore.
Author: Éric Araujo (eric.araujo) *
Date: 2012-02-25 05:36
Following Steven’s message, I will remove the unused function.
Author: Éric Araujo (eric.araujo) *
Date: 2012-02-25 16:29
Hm, I was about to commit this and did a double-take. Are we 100% sure that nobody in the whole wide world of Python does not override this function? Shouldn’t we first send a DeprecationWarning in 3.3 and remove later?
Author: Steven Bethard (bethard) *
Date: 2012-02-26 00:27
It's undocumented, and it begins with an underscore, but it would certainly be safer to deprecate it first.
Author: Geoffrey Spear (geoffreyspear) *
Date: 2012-02-26 00:49
If people do override this provate method, would they really bother calling super() to get the essentially no-op functionality of the superclass method?
FWIW, Google Code and github both seem to be free of any such code.
Author: Éric Araujo (eric.araujo) *
Date: 2012-02-26 03:06
It's undocumented, and it begins with an underscore, but it would certainly be safer to deprecate it first.
Ah, somehow I misunderstood your earlier comment and thought _get_args had been publicized. Removing is safe then.
Geoffrey:
If people do override this provate method, would they really bother calling super() to get the essentially no-op functionality of the superclass method? No, but they would expect repr to use their _get_args, which it won’t after the removal (see the patch).
FWIW, Google Code and github both seem to be free of any such code. Thanks for checking. It’s only a fraction of all code out there, but it’s an indicator.
Author: Petri Lehtinen (petri.lehtinen) *
Date: 2012-05-22 18:47
Nobody's really sure whether it's safe to remove, so let it be there. Leaving it can be justified by symmetry with _get_kwargs. Closing.
Author: Madison May (madison.may) *
Date: 2013-08-31 04:26
Any chance this issue could be reopened? I ran across this bit of code today when working on coverage for argparse. I'd like to again propose the removal or modification of _get_args. I understand that it's there primarily to be overridden, but even that's not useful. Because _get_kwargs uses obj.dict.items(), overriding _get_args to return an iterable of positional args results in those arguments being output twice when repr() is called (once formatted as a positional arg and once formatted as a keyword arg). You end up with strings like the below. I just can't think of any situation where this behavior would be desirable.
Action(['--foo', '-a', '-b'], 'b', option_strings=['--foo', '-a', '-b'], dest='b', nargs='+', const=None, default=42, type='int', choices=[1, 2, 3], help='HELP', metavar='METAVAR')
History
Date
User
Action
Args
2022-04-11 14:57:26
admin
set
github: 58283
2013-08-31 04:26:20
madison.may
set
nosy: + madison.may
messages: +
2012-05-22 18:47:01
petri.lehtinen
set
status: open -> closed
resolution: wont fix
messages: +
stage: resolved
2012-02-26 03:06:37
eric.araujo
set
messages: +
2012-02-26 00:49:29
geoffreyspear
set
messages: +
2012-02-26 00:27:20
bethard
set
messages: +
2012-02-25 16:29:23
eric.araujo
set
messages: +
2012-02-25 05:36:13
eric.araujo
set
assignee: eric.araujo
messages: +
nosy: + eric.araujo
2012-02-21 22:35:24
bethard
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messages: +
2012-02-21 20:55:21
geoffreyspear
set
nosy: + geoffreyspear
2012-02-21 20:24:58
petri.lehtinen
set
nosy: + petri.lehtinen
messages: +
2012-02-21 19:27:03
nadeem.vawda
set
nosy: + bethard
2012-02-21 18:16:39
tshepang
create