[Python-Dev] API for the new sysconfig module

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> On Dec 12, 2010, at 02:42 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>
>>On Sun, 12 Dec 2010 13:01:42 +0100
>>Łukasz Langa <lukasz at langa.pl> wrote:
>>
>>> Wiadomość napisana przez Raymond Hettinger w dniu 2010-12-11, o godz. 22:18:
>>>
>>> >> *(I sometimes lose track of which changes were made in both branches
>>> >> pre-2.7, which ones were mode post-2.7 release, and which ones went in
>>> >> pre-2.7, but were 3.x only regardless)
>>> >
>>> > Right.  I missed that it was already in 2.7.
>>> > So, now we're stuck with it, forever.
>>>
>>> Why not deprecate it for 3.2 (easy since it's probably not yet used anywhere anyway, even in 2.7) and introduce sys.sysconfig.
>>
>>We already had a lot of churn around these APIs (distutils & friends). I
>>don't think it's a good idea to introduce even more churn.
>>Oh and by the way it's too late to add or remove features from 3.2.
>>
>>> I really like that much better than Java-like accessor functions.
>>
>>Do you actually use sysconfig yourself? It's quite a specialized
>>module, and I don't think API elegance arguments have a great weight
>>here.
>
> I have used them and I do think they're fairly ugly and unwieldy.  However, I
> agree that we should not rush into a different design.  Since sysconfig was
> essentially refactored out of distutils (and now we have two ways to do it!),
> and we're getting distutils2 for 3.3, I think it would be better to work out a
> more natural design for sysconfig for 3.3.  Then the sysconfig module can go
> through the natural deprecation cycle.

I don't think any API refactoring worth the pain here. I don't see the
proposed changes make the caller's code that much better.
The existing one is good enough in my opinion.


Tarek
-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org