+1. I never knew about this feature until I noticed it was causing an
inconvenience for Colab/interactive runner users and required workarounds
in Beam.


On Wed, May 14, 2025 at 10:59 AM Rakesh Kumar <rakeshcu...@gmail.com> wrote:

> +1, I have used the abbreviations only for the local test. It is good that
> all my production use cases use the full name. It is a little bit
> inconvenient but it is good to avoid this minefield.
>
> On Tue, May 13, 2025 at 11:07 AM Danny McCormick via dev <
> dev@beam.apache.org> wrote:
>
>> Today, you can abbreviate arguments in Beam Python. This is generally
>> convenient since you can do things like specify `--r` instead of
>> `--runner`, and Beam will infer your intent.
>>
>> Unfortunately, it also has unintended side effects. For example,
>> specifying `--u` will impact not just `--update`, but also
>> `--update_compatibility_version` (caused bug fixed by #34083
>> <https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/34083>), and specifying `--output`
>> like we do in most of our examples
>> <https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aapache%2Fbeam+%22--output%22+language%3APython&type=code&l=Python>
>> will impact `--output_executable_path` as well (notably, this cannot be
>> fixed in an easy way like `--update_compatibility_version` since both
>> `--output` and `--output_executable_path` might be expecting strings).
>> There is not an easy way to resolve this, and it only gets worse as we add
>> more flags over time. The `--output_executable_path` argument is
>> particularly relevant as we move more python pipelines to prism which
>> depends on that arg. We could probably find a band-aid, but it's going to
>> be ugly and a temporary patch at best.
>>
>> To resolve this, I'm proposing making a one time breaking change to get
>> rid of argument abbreviation. This will cause existing pipelines which are
>> using this feature to no longer pick up abbreviated flags. In most cases,
>> this will lead to obvious changes in behavior or failures (e.g. a runner is
>> not specified correctly and now tries to run with the local runner), but in
>> some cases the issue may be more subtle. I do not think there is a great
>> way around this.
>>
>> I'd like to get thoughts - does anyone have objections or other ideas on
>> how we can handle this gracefully? I have
>> https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/34934 as a WIP PR to do this.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Danny
>>
>

Reply via email to