[issue33667] Mock calls on mutable objects

[Lady Red]

Lady Red <mcscope at gmail.com> added the comment:

To have the behavior that you are expecting, I believe the mock would have to store a deep copy of every mutable object that is passed in to any of it's calls, in case that object later mutates. 

That would really expand the memory and time footprint of working with a Mock object.  The mock object would grow with every call to. (This is already true, as it's adding to it's mock_calls list... but it would grow much more. )

I'm also not sure about the safety of trying to deepcopy all objects passed in. 

I think that in addition to the safety and memory/performance issues that I've highlighted, deepcopying all objects would lead to it's own unintuitive behaviors.  Objects you get back from mock_call wouldn't be the objects that it was actually called with, they would be copies. 

I am attaching a file that illustrates this last point.

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nosy: +mcscope at gmail.com
Added file: https://bugs.python.org/file47622/unintuitive_side_effect.py

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