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

Stephen Hansen apt.shansen at gmail.com
Thu Mar 15 22:28:26 CET 2007

For example, I committed a fix for urllib that made it raise IOError instead of an AttributeError (which wasn't explicitly raised, of course) if a certain error condition occurs.

This is changed behavior too, but if we are to postpone all these fixes to 3.0, we won't have half of the fixes in Python 2.6 that are there now.

There's a big difference between that change and this one; that change is 'loud'. It makes noise. It's raising an exception: that exception will either be handled or will propagate up the stack and be noticed somewhere.

I think (ahem.. I read minds...) the problem people are having with this particular change is the fact that the behavior of this function is being changed in a way that is completely silent. Code written to expect one kind of result are now getting a different kind of result... instead of having an error thrown, a warning given, or something explicit... it's just different now.

And it'd be so easy to do it in a way which wouldn't be silent... just throw out a warning, and defer the actual change until the next release.

Expecting people to keep on top of Misc/NEWS and re-read the documentation for every function in their code is a tad unreasonable. I don't personally find it unreasonable for people to ask for a bit more of an extended migration path when changes that are being implemented will cause silent changes in behavior.

It's been very hard for my company to move from 2.3 to 2.4 as a development platform as it is, which we're just barely doing now... for this reason I'm paying a lot more attention to -dev lately to be prepared for 2.6 and beyond. Not everyone has the time to do that.. there's a lot of messages :) And Misc/NEWS is huge. Warnings are a very useful mechanism for semi-painless migrations and upgrades...

(And, if I thought it'd have any chance of going in, I'd submit a patch to add a warning and adjust docs/tests/etc... but this issue seems ever so divided...)

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