On 4/26/06, Thomas Wouters
On 4/26/06, Guido van Rossum
wrote: OK, forget it. I'll face the pitchforks.
Maybe this'll help:
(You can call it 'oldtimer-repellant' if you want to use it to convince people there isn't any *real* backward-compatibility issue.)
I'd worry that it'll cause complaints when the warning is incorrect and a certain directory is being skipped intentionally. E.g. the "string" directory that someone had. Getting a warning like this can be just as upsetting to newbies!
I'm disappointed though -- it sounds like we can never change anything about Python any more because it will upset the oldtimers.
That's a bit unfair, Guido. There are valid reasons not to change Python's behaviour in this respect, regardless of upset old-timers.
Where are the valid reasons? All I see is knee-jerk -1, -1, -1, and "this might cause tools to do the wrong thing". Not a single person attempted to see it from the newbie POV; several people explicitly rejected the newbie POV as invalid. I still don't know the name of any tool that would break due to this *and where the breakage wouldn't be easy to fix by adjusting the tool's behavior*. Yes, fixing tools is a pain. But they have to be fixed for every new Python version anyway -- new keywords, new syntax, new bytecodes, etc.
Besides, you're the BDFL; if you think the old-timers are wrong, I implore you to put their worries aside (after dutiful contemplation.)
I can only do that so many times before I'm no longer the BDFL. It's one thing to break a tie when there is widespread disagreement amongst developers (like about the perfect decorator syntax). It's another to go against a see of -1's.
I've long since decided that any change what so ever will have activist luddites opposing it. I think most of them would stop when you make a clear decision -- how much whining have you had about the if-else syntax since you made the choice? I've heard lots of people gripe about it in private (at PyCon, of course, I never see Pythonistas anywhere else :-P), but I haven't seen any python-dev rants about it. I certainly hate PEP-308's guts, but if if-else is your decision, if-else is what we'll do. And so it is, I believe, with this case.
OK. Then I implore you, please check in that patch (after adding error checking for PyErr_Warn() -- and of course after a2 hs been shipped), and damn the torpedoes. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)