[Python-Dev] Undocumenting test.support in 3.x (was Py3k DeprecationWarning in stdlib) (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Jun 25 23:00:44 CEST 2008

I'm a little worried about making stuff undocumented that every core developer needs to use -- everyone writing tests needs to continue to use test_support (now test.support?). I imagine people writing unit test suites for 3rd party libraries might want to use its services too.

In general I'm not a big fan of having undocumented APIs; 9 out of 10 times someone finds a genuine use case for such an API, and then you're worse off than if it was documented to begin with, since if people start using undocumented APIs, they necessarily reverse-engineer how it works, and then you can never change it. If it was documented, at least you may be able to get away with modifying the undocumented parts, assuming people actually read the docs. (Though we've had cases where the docs and implementation were inconsistent for years, and eventually we ended up fixing the docs...)

--Guido

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Benjamin Peterson <musiccomposition at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 12:18 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:

If you want, but Benjamin plans to undocument this for users along with all other test.support stuff (which I agree with). Most of the APIs in test.support were just quickly written and have not necessarily been thought through in order to make sure that the APIs makes sense (like in this case). Thanks for bringing that up, Brett. Is making testsupport non-public a API in 3.0 fine with everybody?

-- Cheers, Benjamin Peterson "There's no place like 127.0.0.1."

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-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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