[Python-Dev] Support for marking limited API elements in C API docs (original) (raw)

Brian Curtin brian at python.org
Sat Oct 12 22:40:52 CEST 2013

On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 3:17 PM, Serhiy Storchaka <storchaka at gmail.com> wrote:

12.10.13 22:56, Antoine Pitrou написав(ла):

On Sat, 12 Oct 2013 21:19:16 +0200 Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:

Am 12.10.2013 20:20, schrieb Serhiy Storchaka:

12.10.13 21:04, Georg Brandl написав(ла):

in light of the recent thread about PEPs not forming part of the docs, I've just pushed a change that allows to document C API elements not part of the limited API as such. It is done like this: ... c:function:: int PyTupleResize(PyObject **p, Pyssizet newsize) :notlimited: I have not yet begun adding these to the documents; if someone wants to help with this I am glad for volunteers.

Why this is needed? The limited API is unstable and only developers of CPython can use it (but they can look in headers). Well, I may be reading PEP 384 wrongly, but the point is exactly to have a stable API for non-core developers to rely upon, so that they can build extensions that don't need to be recompiled for every version of Python. This is true. However, I find the proposed markup not very enlightening :-) I would prefer if "limited" APIs where marked with a :stableabi: tag. ("limited API" is really a bad synonym for "stable ABI" IMO) Why not limited private API should be documented at all besides sources?

Code is not documentation.

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