On Wed, Jan 26, 2022 at 02:40:32PM -0800, Neil Schemenauer wrote:
On 2022-01-18 23:14, Gregory P. Smith wrote:
Our stdlib unittest already enables warnings by default per https://bugs.python.org/issue10535.
Getting the right people to pay attention to them is always the hard part.
I wonder if we can do a bit better in that regard. When I install 3rd party packages, I create a usercustomize.py file that uses filterwarnings() to turn off all the warnings I don't care about. I don't know how but maybe we could make that easier to do. That way, you don't get buried in warnings coming from code you don't maintain.
Or maybe, as a developer (not an end-user of an app), you could be more proactive in reporting those warnings to the third party, and encouraging them to fix them. Maybe even submitting a patch? If we use a library, then we surely care about that library working correctly, which means that if the library generates warnings, we *should* care about them. They are advanced notice that the library is going to break in the future. Of course I understand that folks are busy maintaining their own project, and have neither the time nor the inclination to take over the maintenance of every one of their dependencies. But we shouldn't just dismiss warnings in those dependencies as "warnings I don't care about" and ignore them as Not My Problem. Like it or not, it is My Problem and we should care about them. Especially in the case of open source software, the lines of responsibility are blurred. Open source libraries are not proprietary black boxes with a strict division between the vender that supplies the library and the people who use the library. They are fully transparent, we can see the warnings and, at least potentially, see how to fix them. And we have the legal right to. This is a hard problem, but it is not solely a technical problem. It is partly a social problem, and you cannot fix social problems with technology. People are ignoring the warnings, and not just the immediate developers of the software, but their downstream users. The open source mantra about many eyes making bugs shallow doesn't work when everyone is intentionally closing their eyes to the warnings of pending bugs. -- Steve