[Python-Dev] New winreg module really an improvement? (original) (raw)

Paul Prescod paul@prescod.net
Tue, 01 Aug 2000 02:34:53 -0400

Mark Hammond wrote:

> Interesting; I'd understood from Paul that you'd given approval to > this module. Actually, it was more more along the lines of me promising to spend some time "over the next few days", and not getting to it. However, I believe it was less than a week before it was just checked in.

It was checked in the day before the alpha was supposed to go out. I thought that was what you wanted! On what schedule would you have preferred us to do it?

I fear this may be a general symptom of the new flurry of activity; no-one with a real job can keep up with this list, meaning valuable feedback on many proposals is getting lost. For example, DigiCool have some obviously smart people, but they are clearly too busy to offer feedback on anything lately. That is a real shame, and a good resource we are missing out on.

From my point of view, it was the appearance of winreg that prompted the "flurry of activity" that led to winreg. I would never have bothered with winreg if I were not responding to the upcoming "event" of the defacto standardization of _winreg. It was clearly designed (and I use the word loosely) by various people at Microsoft over several years -- with sundry backwards and forwards compatibility hacks embedded.

I'm all for slow and steady, deliberate design. I'm sorry _winreg was rushed but I could only work with the time I had and the interest level of the people around. Nobody else wanted to discuss it. Nobody wanted to review the module. Hardly anyone here even knew what was in the OLD module.

I am quite interested to hear from people like Gordon and Bill about their thoughts.

I am too. I would also be interested in hearing from people who have not spent the last five years with the Microsoft API because _winreg was a very thin wrapper over it and so will be obvious to those who already know it.

I have the feeling that an abstraction over the APIs would never be as "comfortable" as the Microsoft API you've been using for all of these years.

Paul Prescod - Not encumbered by corporate consensus "I don't want you to describe to me -- not ever -- what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand," Grandmother said. -- John Irving, "A Prayer for Owen Meany"