[Python-Dev] standard library mimetypes module pathologically broken? (original) (raw)

Jacob Rus jacobolus at gmail.com
Sat Aug 1 04:53:02 CEST 2009

Andrew McNabb wrote:

Jacob Rus wrote:

* The operation is crazy: It defines a MimeTypes class which actually stores the type mappings, but this class is designed to be a singleton. The way that such a design is enforced is through the use of the module-global 'init' function, which makes an instance of the class, and then maps all of the functions in the module global namespace to instance methods. But confusingly, all such functions are also defined independently of the init function, with definitions such as:

def guesstype(url, strict=True): if not inited: init() return guesstype(url, strict) I can't speak for any of your other complaints, but I know that this weird init stuff is fixed in trunk.

Actually, this fix changes the semantics of the code quite substantially (not in any way that is incompatible with the extremely vague documentation, but in a way that might break any code that relies on the Python <=2.6 behavior). If such a change is okay, then we can do quite a bit of implementation change under these new semantics.

Cheers, Jacob Rus

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