[Python-Dev] Rework nntlib? (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue Sep 14 12:30:14 CEST 2010

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Hello, Like the email package, nntplib in py3k is broken (because of various bytes/str mismatches; I suppose the lack of a test suite didn't help when porting). I would like to take the opportunity to improve the API a bit; no heavy re-architecting, but simply a bunch of changes to make it higher-level. Is it acceptable? (and, yes, I would add a test suite)

This is the kind of question that's hard to answer in the abstract. In principle it sounds like a reasonable idea, but in practice, if the old API works correctly for 7-bit ASCII, it should probably remain available (even if it's nominally broken for Unicode and 8-bit ASCII).

Adding a higher level API is almost certainly fine. Removing the old lower level APIs is more questionable, and will likely depend on precisely how broken they are.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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