[Python-Dev] .clinic.c vs .c.clinic (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Wed Jan 22 23:47:36 CET 2014

On 1/22/2014 4:41 PM, Larry Hastings wrote:

And yes, with 13 votes cast, it ended with a tie between "clinic/{filename}.h" and "clinic/{filename}.h", both at +4. As officiant I get to be the tiebreaker.

Yep.

My thoughts so far: * A bunch of longtime Python core devs cast their votes for "clinic": Nick, Terry, Stefan, Brett, Barry. On the other hand, Antoine and Georg preferred "clinic". * We have the precendent of pycache, where we cache machine-generated code that's the equivalent of code that in a file that's a sibling of the pycache directory. * But it's not a perfect metaphor. For one, this directory will be checked in; pycache directories should not be checked in. For another, if you blow away a pycache directory everything automatically works fine. If you blow away a directory of Clinic generated code, you have to rebuild it by hand. Until you do you've broken your build. * We also have the precedent of "stringlib", a directory containing a bunch of unpleasant-to-look-at headers containing C code. It's not machine-generated code. But it is templatized code, so it's kind of compile-time generated on the fly if you squint at it. And it is checked in. * We also have the precedent of some machine-generated C code that is checked in in the Python tree: Python-ast.c, Python-ast.h. (Maybe one or two more? I forget.) None of these files have funny double-underscores prepended to their names.

Also: If you only examine the people who voted +1 on "clinic", the sum of their votes on "clinic" is -0.5. If you only examine the people who voted +1 on "clinic", the sum of their votes on "clinic" is +2. Therefore, the people who voted for "clinic" are pretty tolerant of "clinic". The people who voted for "clinic" are less tolerant of "clinic". And finally: The total positive votes for "clinic" were 6, and total for the minus -2. The total positive votes for "clinic" were 7, and the minus -3. So "clinic" seems slightly more divisive. I'm leaning towards "clinic", primarily because of precedents in CPython trunk. But also because it makes it look more on-purpose and permanent. And because it's more aesthetically pleasing to look at.

I think you nicely summarized the various thoughts on 'clinic/' versus 'clinic'.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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