[Python-Dev] Breaking undocumented API (original) (raw)

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Wed Nov 17 14:25:34 CET 2010

On 17/11/2010 13:21, Fred Drake wrote:

2010/11/17 Michael Foord<fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk>:

So -1 on splitting Python development style guide into multiple documents. I don't think that the publicness or API stability promises of the standard library are part of a style guide. They're an essential part of the library documentation. They aren't a guide for 3rd-party code, and are specific to the standard library.

PEP 8 isn't targeted at third party code - is the development style guide for the Python standard library.

This document gives coding conventions for the Python code comprising the standard library in the main Python distribution.

The ideal place for informing the Python core developers the naming conventions we should use for our public APIs...

(Which is why Guido said that a style guide is the right place for this information.)

It doesn't mean it shouldn't be information provided to library users as well. (As discussed.)

All the best,

Michael Foord

If we can't come up with something reasonable for the standard library, we certainly shouldn't be making recommendations on the matter for 3rd party code. If we do come up with something reasonable, we can recommend it to others later (once field-proven), and without duplication. (Possibly by referring to the standard library documentation, and possibly by refactoring. That's not important until we have something, though.)

-Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. "A storm broke loose in my mind." --Albert Einstein

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