[Python-Dev] Documenting the private C API (was Re: Questions about signal handling.) (original) (raw)

Eric Snow ericsnowcurrently at gmail.com
Tue Sep 25 11🔞04 EDT 2018

On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 8:30 AM Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

On Sep 25, 2018, at 10:18, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote: > Putting them in the C API documentation risks making the docs harder to > browse through for third-party users. I think it's enough if there's a > comment in the .h file explaining the given function.

It’s a trade-off for sure. I don’t have any great ideas about how to balance that, and I don’t know what documentation techniques would help, but it does often bother me that I can’t search for them on docs.python.org.

FWIW, I've run into the same issue. Perhaps we could have a single dedicated page in the C-API docs for internal API. It could be just a big table with a bold red warning at the top (e.g. "These are internal-only APIs, here for the benefit of folks working on CPython itself."). We could even have a CI check to ensure that new internal API (which doesn't happen often) gets added to the table.

-eric

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