<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 3/14/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Michael Foord</b> <<a href="mailto:fuzzyman@voidspace.org.uk">fuzzyman@voidspace.org.uk</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Phillip J. Eby wrote:<br>> At 06:47 PM 3/14/2007 +0100, Martin v. Löwis wrote:<br>><br>>> Phillip J. Eby schrieb:<br>>><br>>>> This backwards-incompatible change is therefore contrary to policy and
<br>>>> should be reverted, pending a proper transition plan for the change<br>>>> (such as introduction of an alternative API and deprecation of the<br>>>> existing one.)<br>>>><br>>> I'm clearly opposed to this proposal, or else I wouldn't have committed
<br>>> the change in the first place.<br>>><br>><br>> That much is obvious. But I haven't seen any explanation as to why<br>> explicitly-documented and explicitly-tested behavior should be treated as a
<br>> bug in policy terms, just because people don't like the documented and<br>> tested behavior.<br>><br>><br>Because it's clearly a bug and has even been shown to fix bugs in<br>current code ?<br><br>
Honestly it is this sort of pointless prevarication that gives<br>python-dev a bad name.</blockquote><div><br>However, changing documented, tested behaviour without warning gives Python an even worse name. I agree with PJE that the change is the wrong thing to do, simply because it sets (yet another) precedent. If providing an alternate API with clearer semantics is too 'heavy-weight' a solution and warning is for some reason unacceptable (I don't see why; all the arguments against warning there go for *any* warning in Python) -- then the problem isn't bad enough to fix it by breaking other code.
<br></div></div><br>-- <br>Thomas Wouters <<a href="mailto:thomas@python.org">thomas@python.org</a>><br><br>Hi! I'm a .signature virus! copy me into your .signature file to help me spread!