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

Glyph Lefkowitz glyph at twistedmatrix.com
Mon Aug 3 00:36:27 CEST 2009

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 4:17 PM, Jacob Rus <jacobolus at gmail.com> wrote:

Robert Lehmann wrote: > Jacob Rus wrote: >> Here is a somewhat more substantively changed version. This one does >> away with the 'inited' flag and the 'init' function, which might be >> impossible given that their documented (though I would be extremely >> surprised if anyone calls them in third-party code) > [snip] > > There seem to be quite a bunch of high-profile third-party modules > relying on this interface, eg. Zope, Plone, TurboGears, and CherryPy. See > http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=mimetypes.init+lang%3Apython for a > more thorough listing. > > Given that most of them aren't ported to Python 3 yet, I guess, changing > the semantics in 3.x seems not-too-bad to me.

No, it's bad. If I may quote Guido: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=227041

So, once more for emphasis: *Don't change your APIs at the same time as

porting to Py3k!*

Please follow this policy as much as possible in the standard library; the language transition is going to be hard enough.

Put a different way: please don't change the library unless you're alsogoing to write a 2to3 fixer that somehow updates all calling code, too.

Ooh, okay. Well I guess we can’t get rid of those then!

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