[Python-Dev] Convention on functions that shadow existing stdlib functions (original) (raw)

Eli Bendersky eliben at gmail.com
Wed Jul 27 15:58:53 CEST 2011

> 2. Some functions like unlink and rmtree are obviously redundant, and shadow > frequently used Python stdlib functions, so I would either kill them > completely or at least rename them appropriately.

But they aren't redundant, since the test.support versions ignore errors.

As I mentioned elsewhere, it's not good practice to have two functions with the same name doing something slightly different, in different modules in the code-base.

Perhaps what we could do is move the documentation for test.support to the devguide, and then vet the test suite so that unlink and friends are always called as 'support.unlink', etc. Moving the documentation to the devguide is a good compromise between not documenting them at all and placing the documentation in a user-visible location.

What do you mean by vetting the test suite so that unlink is always taken from test.support? I suppose some tests would specifically want the original unlink's functionality. In fact, at least a few tests use os.unlink exlicitly.

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