Guido van Rossum writes:
I'll leave the decision to revert your checkin to Fred, who knows the code (and has pending changes to it of his own, which now cause conflicts).
The conflict was minor; Eric managed to add a blank line at the end of the file, and I'd made adjustments to the exception being raised there. Regarding Eric's changes, I'd like to see them discussed before being made part of the library; the interface seems quite ad hoc, and it's not clear that they are the right way to go about adding sequence support. What I've seen for sequences in INI files in the past is something like this (working from memory): [SomeSection] NumPathEntries=3 PathEntry1=c:\path\one PathEntry2=c:\path\two PathEntry3=c:\path\three (I'm not advocating that as the "right" way to do it, I'm just noting that what I've seen in practice is very different from the solution Eric implemented.) The value of having __str__() return a parsable INI file is highly questionable; the motivation should be explained and discussed. The issue of ordering sections and options in the same way as the input seems unimportant as well; comments are lost anyway. Being able to surgically edit a config file using the ConfigParser module is simply not a supported use case. (I wrote a module once that did support surgical editing, and it was a royal pain! Long lost in a disk crash.) I'll be reverting the change shortly. Eric, I would like to encourage you to pursue this functionality via discussion on python-dev with the patch submitted via SourceForge. The functional extensions are not unwelcome by any means. NB: For a very different approach to handling configuration, there's something in Zope's CVS called "ZConfig". Of particular interest is the development branch that includes support for configuration schema: http://cvs.zope.org/Packages/ZConfig/?only_with_tag=zconfig-schema-devel-bra... BTW, I'm back on python-dev now, but it's still a good idea to CC things that need my specific attention. -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org> PythonLabs at Zope Corporation