[Python-Dev] Exposing different versions of a system call in Python (original) (raw)

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Fri Jan 19 15:10:29 EST 2018

On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 at 01:30 Pablo Galindo Salgado <pablogsal at gmail.com> wrote:

Hello everyone,

In today's episode of exposing useful Linux system calls I am exposing preadv2 in this PR: https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/5239 as requested in this issue: https://bugs.python.org/issue31368 As njsmith has commented in the PR, preadv2 only exists because regular preadv was missing a flags argument, and in C the only way to add an argument is to make a new function. In Python we have already exposed preadv2 and a possible solution would be add a optional argument that passes the new parametera to preadv and calls preadv2 if this happens. On the other side, we have pipe and pipe2 as an example of exposing two versions when this situation happens. The question is: What is preferable, exposing both functions or augment the old one?

I guess the question is whether discoverability would be hurt by combining. My guess is no, in which case if the only difference between the two system calls is a single argument then I would make a single function. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20180119/77211eb3/attachment.html>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list