[Python-Dev] Deprecate codecs.open() and StreamWriter/StreamReader (original) (raw)

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at haypocalc.com
Fri May 27 17:35:31 CEST 2011

Le vendredi 27 mai 2011 16:01:14, Nick Coghlan a écrit :

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:42 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote: > Wrong order: first write a PEP, then discuss, then get approval, > then patch.

Indeed. If another committer says "please revert and better justify this change" then we revert it. We don't get into commit wars.

I reverted my controversal commit.

Something does need to be done to resolve the duplication of functionality between the io and codecs modules, but it is far from clear that deprecating chunks of the longer standing API is the right way to go about it.

Yes, StreamReader & friends are present in Python since Python 2.0.

This is especially true given Guido's explicit direction following the issues with the PyCObject removal in 3.2 that we be very conservative about introducing additional incompatibilities between Python 2 and Python 3.

I did search for usage of these classes on the Internet, and except projects implementing their own codecs (and so implement their StreamReader/StreamWriter classes, even if they don't use it), I only found one project using directly StreamReader: pygment (*). I searched quickly, so don't trust these results :-) StreamReader & friends are used indirectly through codecs.open(). My patch changes codecs.open() to make it reuse open (io.TextIOWrapper), so the deprecation of StreamReader would not be noticed by most users.

I think that there are much more users of PyCObject than users using directly the StreamReader API (not through codecs.open()).

(*) I also found Sphinx, but I was wrong: it doesn't use StreamReader, it just has a full copy of the UTF-8-SIG codec which has a StreamReader class. I don't think that the class is used.

Victor

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