On Tue, 6 Aug 2019 at 17:39, Matt Billenstein <matt@vazor.com> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 05, 2019 at 04:22:50AM -0000, raymond.hettinger@gmail.com wrote:
This once seemed like a reasonable and innocuous idea to me; however, I've been using the 3.8 beta heavily for a month and no longer think it is a good idea. The warning crops up frequently, often due to third-party packages (such as docutils and bottle) that users can't easily do anything about.
Perhaps those packages could be flagged now via pylint and problems raised with the respective package maintainers before the actual 3.8 release? Checking the top 100 or top 1000 packages on PyPI?
I don't see issues reported in the bug trackers for docutils and bottle. Maybe as a start, someone could raise issues there? And any other projects Raymond encountered issues with? If nothing else, it's polite to give these projects a warning now that they should be stricter about how they use escape sequences, because the core devs intend to deprecate and ultimately remove the current permissive behaviour. That's what the 3.8 betas are for, after all. If the feedback from bug reports like this is that projects consider it an unacceptable burden to change, then maybe we would then rethink the timescales of the deprecation, or even whether we should do it at all. If they just release a quick fix, maybe we're worrying over the wrong thing here? I remain ambivalent about the change myself. The point that it's the false positives we *want* to address, but this change hits the false negatives, is a telling one for me. I don't think I'd support the change now if we were discussing it for the first time. But on the other hand, the discussion has already happened, and the decision was made, and while I'm OK with responding to the evidence that having loud user-visible warnings is a bad UX, I don't think there's any new evidence here that significantly changes the facts on which the decision to eventually make invalid escapes an error was made - just evidence that the way we chose to introduce that change may be a problem. (And honestly, to my knowledge, we've never yet found a case where there *hasn't* been controversy about warnings from libraries being triggered by user code, so it's not like this is a new problem). Paul