Marking a method M declared in C with abstractmethod indicates that M needs to be *implemented* in any subclass D of C for D to be instantiated.
We usually think of overriding a method N to mean replacing one implementation in some class E with another in some subclass of E, F. Often, the subclass implementation calls super to add behavior rather than replace it. I think that this concept of *implementing* is different than *overriding*. However, abstract classes can have reasonable definition, and should sometimes be overridden in the sense that subclasses should call super. For example, when inheriting from AbstractContextManager, you need to *override* the abstractmethod (!) __exit__, and if you want your class to work polymorphically, you should call super. This is extremely weird. Understandably, the pylint people are confused by it (https://github.com/PyCQA/pylint/issues/1594) and raise bad warnings. It also makes it impossible for me to raise warnings in my ipromise (https://github.com/NeilGirdhar/ipromise) project. See, for example, https://github.com/NeilGirdhar/ipromise/blob/master/ipromise/test/test_overrides.py classes Y and W, which ought to raise, but that would raise on reasonable code. My suggestion is to add a rarely used flag to abstractmethod: class AbstractContextManager: @abstractmethod(overrideable=True) def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_value, traceback): pass This would set a flag on the method like __abstractmethod_overrideable__, which could be checked by ipromise's @overrides decorator, pylint's call check, and anyone else that wants to know that a method should be overridden. Best, Neil
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