For example, I committed a fix for urllib that made it raise IOError
instead
of an AttributeError (which wasn't explicitly raised, of course) if a
certain
error condition occurs.
This is changed behavior too, but if we are to postpone all these fixes
to 3.0, we won't have half of the fixes in Python 2.6 that are there now.
There's a big difference between that change and this one; that change is
'loud'. It makes noise. It's raising an exception: that exception will
either be handled or will propagate up the stack and be noticed somewhere.
I *think* (ahem.. I read minds...) the problem people are having with this
particular change is the fact that the behavior of this function is being
changed in a way that is completely silent. Code written to expect one kind
of result are now getting a different kind of result... instead of having an
error thrown, a warning given, or something explicit... it's just different
now.
And it'd be so easy to do it in a way which wouldn't be silent... just throw
out a warning, and defer the actual change until the next release.
Expecting people to keep on top of Misc/NEWS and re-read the documentation
for every function in their code is a tad unreasonable. I don't personally
find it unreasonable for people to ask for a bit more of an extended
migration path when changes that are being implemented will cause *silent*
changes in behavior.
It's been very hard for my company to move from 2.3 to 2.4 as a development
platform as it is, which we're just barely doing now... for this reason I'm
paying a lot more attention to -dev lately to be prepared for 2.6 and
beyond. Not everyone has the time to do that.. there's a lot of messages :)
And Misc/NEWS is *huge*. Warnings are a very useful mechanism for
semi-painless migrations and upgrades...
(And, if I thought it'd have any chance of going in, I'd submit a patch to
add a warning and adjust docs/tests/etc... but this issue seems ever so
divided...)
--S
_______________________________________________
Python-Dev mailing list
Python-Dev@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
Unsubscribe:
http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
