[Python-Dev] PEP 257 and init (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Jan 4 02:49:32 EST 2016

On 4 January 2016 at 17:01, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

Ask the PSF/pypi people to either prohibit such names or require a disclaimer of some sort. They are inherently confusing: "I took a look at pep008" does not mean that one even looked at the PEP. Even when the context makes clear that the referent is the module, there is confusion as to its authoritativeness. That Facudo would post here about the module's output illustrates that. To me, the name copying violates our informal trademark within Pythonland on 'PEP####'.

I don't think that's the right answer, as opinionated tools do serve a useful purpose in preventing bikeshedding during code review (people expect computers to be annoyingly pedantic, which frees up the human reviewers to focus on higher level concerns). As projects evolve over time, they may develop their own tweaks and customisations in their style guide and switch to a more configurable tool, or they may not.

When some of the default settings for the pep8 utility became a problem, I was able to talk to the developers and persuade them to tune their defaults to be more in line with the actual PEP text, and keep their extensions to optional settings.

A similar approach may work for PEP 257, by clarifying which aspects tools should be leaving to human judgement (beyond the question of whether or not to opt in to following PEP 257 at all - it's far less universal than PEP 8).

Cheers, Nick.

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

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list