[Python-Dev] PEP487: Simpler customization of class creation

[Martin Teichmann]

Hello,

there has been quite some discussion on why PEP 487's
__init_subclass__  initializes subclasses, and not the class itself. I
think the most important details have been already thoroughly
discussed here.

One thing I was missing in the discussion is practical examples. I
have been using PEP 487-like metaclasses since several years now, and
I have never come across an application where it would have even been
nice to initialize the class itself. Also, while researching other
people's code when I wrote PEP 487, I couldn't find any such code
elsewhere, yet I found a lot of code where people took the wildest
measure to prevent a metaclass in doing its job on the first class it
is used for. One example is enum.EnumMeta, which contains code not to
make enum.Enum an enum (I do not try to propose that the enum module
should use PEP 487, it's way to complicated for that).

So once we have a practical example, we could start discussing how to
mitigate the problem.

Btw, everyone is still invited to review the patch for PEP 487 at
http://bugs.python.org/issue27366. Many thanks to Nick who already
reviewed, and also to Guido who left helpful comments!

Greetings

Martin