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

Jacob Rus jacobolus at gmail.com
Wed Aug 12 00:09:15 CEST 2009

Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:

Jacob Rus wrote: No, [changing the semantics in 3.x] is 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. Ooh, okay.  Well I guess we can’t get rid of those then! Indeed not.

Well, I've had some patches up at http://bugs.python.org/issue6626 for over a week now, and my updated version should have identical semantics to the current module, just with the module's actual behavior clear to anyone reading the code, some serious edge-case bugs fixed, and a general performance improvement.

I'd like to make some further changes, particularly in which types and extensions the module knows about, to bring it up to date, and ideally even to remove the dependency on an Apache install, but I'd like some discussion and advice about it.

I have some other questions: How does one deprecate part of a standard library API? How can we alert users to the deprecation? When can the deprecated parts be removed?

I don't want to just give up on this, because I put more than a day of time into it, and I really do think the previous code was of poorer quality than should be in the standard library: I don't want new Python users reading it and thinking that's just how things are done around here. But if no one looks at my patches, I'm not sure what more I can do.

Again: http://bugs.python.org/issue6626

Cheers, Jacob

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