[Python-Dev] Support for PyGetSetDefs in pydoc (original) (raw)

Georg Brandl g.brandl at gmx.net
Thu Jul 20 21:32:58 CEST 2006

Barry Warsaw wrote:

Why did I do this instead of trying to hunt down some existing getset or member descriptor? For one thing, there really aren't very good candidates for such objects in the built-in modules. You can't use objects like datetime.timedelta.days in types.py because datetime is not importable early enough for types.py to use it. Even if there were likely candidates, they would be accidents of implementation and it doesn't seem like a good idea to force force some future datetime maintainer to have to fix types.py when she decides that datetime.timedelta.days should be implemented in some other way.

A 3rd party extension module doesn't work either because you really need the tie-in from types.py, inspect.py, and pydoc.py. You certainly don't want to go poking new values into types.py from the outside, and besides inspect.py and pydoc.py also need to learn about these fundamental built-in Python types. ISTM the most straightforward approach is to provide these types in a built-in C module, linked into the interpreter so types.py can get access to it as early as it needs to. Also, because the type that these descriptors are attached to cannot be instantiated from Python, they should be quite benign, existing only in order to give type() something to query.

Perhaps you could put the objects into _testcapi. That way no new module has to be deployed (is _testcapi installed on every system?)

Georg

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