[Python-Dev] New winreg module really an improvement?

[Guido van Rossum]

Paul wrote:
> I had no personal interest in an API for the windows registry but I
> could not, in good conscience, let the original one become the 
> standard Python registry API.

and later:
> I use it off and on. There are still corners of _winreg that I don't
> understand. That's part of why I thought it needed to be covered up with
> something that could be fully documented. To get even the level of
> understanding I have, of the *original* _winreg, I had to scour the Web.
> The perl docs were the most helpful. :)

I believe this is the crux of the problem.  Your only mistake was that
you criticized and then tried to redesign a (poorly designed) API that
you weren't intimately familiar with.

My boss tries to do this occasionally; he has a tendency to complain
that my code doesn't contain enough classes.  I tell him to go away --
he only just started learning Python from a book that I've never seen,
so he wouldn't understand...

Paul, I think that the best thing to do now is to withdraw winreg.py,
and to keep (and document!) the _winreg extension with the
understanding that it's a wrapper around poorly designed API but at
least it's very close to the C API.  The leading underscore should be
a hint that this is not a module for every day use.

Hopefully someday someone will eventually create a set of higher level
bindings modeled after the Java, VB or C# version of the API.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/)