[docs] [issue19047] Clarify weakref.finalize objects are kept alive automatically

[Nick Coghlan]

New submission from Nick Coghlan:

I was just looking at weakref.finalize objects trying to figure out if they solve a problem I'm thinking about (they do), and I couldn't figure out from the class documentation ([1]) whether or not I needed to take care of keeping the object returned from weakref.finalize alive.

I don't (the module keeps finalizers alive automatically), but this critical piece of information is only mentioned in the example much further down in the documentation ([2]).

[1] http://docs.python.org/dev/library/weakref#weakref.finalize
[2] http://docs.python.org/dev/library/weakref#finalizer-objects

The 3.4 What's New should also explicitly mention weakref.finalize as an alternative to __del__ methods (perhaps as a comment in the section on PEP 422, perhaps just in the weakref section)

----------
assignee: docs at python
components: Documentation
messages: 198046
nosy: docs at python, ncoghlan
priority: normal
severity: normal
stage: needs patch
status: open
title: Clarify weakref.finalize objects are kept alive automatically
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.4

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue19047>
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