[Python-Dev] okay to remove argparse.all? (original) (raw)

Steven Bethard steven.bethard at gmail.com
Mon Nov 1 15:55:25 CET 2010

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:

On 01/11/2010 14:48, Steven Bethard wrote:

I think the easiest and most sensible way to address http://bugs.python.org/issue9353 is to simply remove the all definition from argparse - everything that doesn't start with an underscore in the module is already meant to be exposed. But then I wonder - is all considered part of the public API of a module? Or is it okay to just remove it and assume that no one should have been accessing it directly anyway? Isn't it better to add the missing elements - what is the problem with that approach?

It just requires extra synchronization, and history shows that I always forget to add them. ;-)

Not defining all will mean that "from argparse import *" will also export all the modules you import (copy, os, re, sys, textwrap).

That won't happen in the case of argparse - all modules are imported like "import os as _os".

Steve

Where did you get that preposterous hypothesis? Did Steve tell you that?         --- The Hiphopopotamus

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