[DB-SIG] definition of .rowcount

[Michael Bayer]

Hey all -

Had a user today confused about the word "affected", when we describe the definition of cursor.rowcount.  Per pep-249:

.rowcount 
          
            This read-only attribute specifies the number of rows that
            the last .execute*() produced (for DQL statements like
            'select') or affected (for DML statements like 'update' or
            'insert').

So as many of you know, MySQL has actually two options for how rowcount can be reported.  It can report the number of rows "found", that is, matched by the WHERE criterion of an UPDATE or DELETE statement, or it can report the number of rows that were actually updated or deleted, and here we're talking about an UPDATE that may or may not have had a net change in row value.   The Python MySQL drivers tend to default to the latter.    Every other database/DBAPI I've worked with only offers the former.

Question is, is there an intent behind the term "affected" here?   

If it is intentionally vague, could there be some more explicit phrasing to that effect, "by 'affected' we mean whatever the underlying driver interprets this to mean" or something along those lines ?  Or if it really means, "number of rows matched", should the word "affected" be altered here ?

Thanks for reading.