[Python-Dev] PEP 411: Provisional packages in the Python standard library (original) (raw)

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Sat Feb 11 08:29:44 CET 2012

Eric Snow wrote:

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 8:10 PM, Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 22:13, Jim J. Jewett <jimjjewett at gmail.com> wrote:

Eli Bendersky wrote (in http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2012-February/116393.html ):

A package will be marked provisional by including the following paragraph as a note at the top of its documentation page: I really would like some marker available from within Python itself. The big problem with this is that it's something that will have to be maintained, so it adds some additional burden (I suppose it will have to be tested as well).

"Big problem"?

Maintenance of bsddb3 has been a big problem. Maintenance of a single module-level name for provisional packages is a small problem.

The PEP already gives boilerplate which is required to go into the documentation of provisional packages. Requiring a top level name, and test for that, is no harder than what's already expected, and it is a constant difficulty regardless of package.

In fact, we could (should?) have a single test that applies to all packages in the std lib:

for package in packages: if isprovisional(package): assert hasattr(package, 'provisional') assert package documentation includes boilerplate else: assert not hasattr(package, 'provisional') assert package documentation does not include boilerplate

Arguably, the canonical test for whether a package is provisional or not should be the existence of provisional:

for package in packages: if hasattr(package, 'provisional') assert package documentation includes boilerplate else: assert package documentation does not includes boilerplate

An easy way for (2) would be just grepping on the Python docs for the provisional note and seeing which modules have it.

Not all OSes include grep. Not all Python installations include the docs.

-- Steven

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