[Python-Dev] breaking list.append()

[Greg Stein]

On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Christian Tismer wrote:
> Greg Stein wrote:
> > +1 on breaking it now, rather than deferring it Yet Again.
> > 
> > IMO, there has been plenty of warning, and there is plenty of time to
> > correct the software.
> > 
> > I'm +0 on adding a warning architecture to Python to support issuing a
> > warning/error when .append is called with multiple arguments.
> 
> Well, the (bad) effect of this patch is that you cannot run
> PythonWin any longer unless Mark either supplies an updated
> distribution, or one corrects the two barfing Scintilla
> support scripts by hand.

Yes, but there is no reason to assume this won't happen.

Why don't we simply move forward with the assumption that PythonWin and
Scintilla will be updated? If we stand around pointing at all the uses of
append that are incorrect and claim that is why we can't move forward,
then we won't get anywhere. Instead, let's just *MOVE* and see that
software authors update accordingly. It isn't like it is a difficult
change to make. Heck, PythonWin and Scintilla could be updated within the
week and re-released. *WAY* ahead of the 1.6 release.

> Bad for me, since I'm building Stackless Python against 1.5.2+,
> and that means the users will see PythonWin barf when installing SLP.

If you're building a system using an interim release of Python, then I
think you need to take responsibility for that. If you don't want those
people to have problems, then you can back out the list.append change. Or
you can release patches to PythonWin. I don't think the Python world at
large should be hampered because somebody is using an unstable/interim
version of Python. Again: we couldn't move forward.

> Adding a warning instead of raising an exception would be nice IMHO,
> since the warning could probably contain the file name and line
> number to change, and I would leave my users with this easy task.

Yes, this would be nice. But somebody has to take the time to code it up.
The warning won't appear out of nowhere...

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/