[Python-Dev] Proposal to revert r54204 (splitext change) (original) (raw)

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Wed Mar 14 22:45:15 CET 2007

Phillip J. Eby wrote:

At 08:30 AM 3/15/2007 +1100, Delaney, Timothy (Tim) wrote:

Phillip J. Eby wrote:

In addition to being made in the face of controversy and opposition, this change is an alteration to documented and tested behavior and thus cannot reasonably be considered a mere bug fix. FWIW, I support Phillip on this. There can be no question that the old behaviour was expected. IMO this is just gratuitous breakage. The only fix that shold be made is to the splitext documentation to match the docstring. A change to the documented behaviour should require a future import for at least one version. That's even assuming that the change is desireable (I don't believe so). We have multiple anecdotes of actual, existing code that will break with this change. So far I haven't seen any actual code posted that is currently broken by the existing behaviour. FWIW, I think that, were we writing splitext() now, we should go with the proposed behavior. It's reasonable and justifiable even on Windows (even though Windows Explorer agrees with the current splitext() behavior.) But, that doesn't actually have any bearing on the current discussion, since splitext()'s behavior is existing and documented. Certainly, there is code that's broken by the existing behavior -- otherwise the patch would never have been submitted in the first place. However, that doesn't automatically make it a Python bug, especially if the existing behavior is documented and covered by regression tests. I just want to clarify this point, because I don't wish to enter another round of discussion about the merits of one behavior or the other: the merits one way or the other are pretty much irrelevant to the policy issue at hand.

It looks to me like a clear bugfix (the fact that there were unit tests for the insane behaviour doesn't make it any less a bug). The current docstring that states that the first element may be empty hardly counts as it being a 'documented feature'.

At the least it is a grey area and not a policy reversal. The policy is that bugfixes can go in with warnings. So, as a debatable issue whether it is a bug (I think it is fairly clear), then it doesn't change or contravene policy.

Michael Foord

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