On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 7:23 PM, Brian Granger ellisonbg.net@gmail.comwrote:
I know this is not the zope list
You're right, it's not. Perhaps you could send a message to the interface package development list?
https://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/interface-dev
Yes, I will do that. I wanted to get an opinion here first from the "users of zope.interface" first though to see if anyone else had run into these things in the wild.
The disturbing thing is that now A (which is just an object) has been
hacked on by zope.interface. It has additional methods (__provides__, etc.) that are specific to zope.
Why does this disturb you? Would you feel better if it were called __zope_provides__?
Maybe a little bit, but name collisions are a minor concern in my case...
Summary: If a class A is later subclassed by something B that calls
zi.implements, the original class A becomes infected with all the zope.interface stuff.
A gets an additional attribute. Its behavior doesn't change in any other way. I don't really see what's wrong with that, unless you have a differing definition of the __provides__ attribute in your code.
...but __provides__ is not exactly a "plain old attribute":
* The __provides__ attribute is a descriptor that sometimes raises AttributeError even though it exists. This is how I found all of this. I called dir on my class and __provides__ was listed. But hasattr(cls, '__provides') returned False. I consider this to be a separate bug, but because __provides__ started to appear on all of my classes, I was seeing it *everywhere*.
* The internal implementation of __provides__ is handled by a custom __metaclass__ hook. zope.interface tries to be pretty careful in not actually *using* a custom metaclass, but it does set and then later remove the __metaclass__ hook.
In my mind, both of these things are in the "unwanted side effect" category.
Is there a way to avoid this?
Depending on what your definition of "this" is, there almost certainly is. In the simplest case, you could submit a patch to zope interface.
That is definitely a likely outcome of this discussion. For now though, I was just wondering if other's had run into this issue. For now, it sounds like not.
Cheers,
Brian
Doesn't this seem like a bad idea?
No.
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