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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Mon Jan 4 12🔞01 EST 2016

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 11:49 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

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).

Hm. I don't want the PSF to flex its muscles about trademarks, but I still don't like that there are tools named after PEPs (especially since the tools are not written by the same people that wrote the PEPs). I still recall the first time someone emailed me about a "pep8" issue (I had never heard of the tool by that name) and I was thoroughly confused for a long time.

That said I expect it's too late to try and get the pep8 authors to rename it; but I filed an issue with the pep257 project and they are going to change the name: https://github.com/GreenSteam/pep257/issues/172 .

FWIW I am happy that the tools exist! They can be very useful and I use pep8 myself. But I always let it know who's boss. :-)

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