[docs] [issue36355] Remove documentation and internal use of the RESTRICTED constants for PyMemberDef's flags field

[Josh Rosenberg]

New submission from Josh Rosenberg <shadowranger+python at gmail.com>:

While looking up background info for #36347, I noticed that the docs for PyMemberDef ( https://docs.python.org/3/extending/newtypes.html#generic-attribute-management ) define the following flags:

* READONLY
* READ_RESTRICTED
* WRITE_RESTRICTED
* RESTRICTED

Of those, WRITE_RESTRICTED has been documented incorrectly since Python 3.0a2 (it got renamed to PY_WRITE_RESTRICTED in structmember.h, apparently due to a name clash with VS 2008 on Windows).

Luckily, the constants are useless; AFAICT they were there solely to support restricted mode (via the rexec and Bastion modules). The modules were apparently disabled in Python 2.3 "due to various known and not readily fixable security holes" ( https://docs.python.org/2/library/restricted.html ), and the modules themselves officially deprecated in 2.6, and removed completely in 3.0.

Rather than fixing up the docs, maybe it's time to kill these constants for good? Probably shouldn't remove the definitions in structmember.h (if someone wrote code using them, we shouldn't needlessly break compilation), but the interpreter and standard library should stop setting them, and the documentation for them should be removed.

----------
assignee: docs at python
components: Documentation, Extension Modules, Interpreter Core
messages: 338282
nosy: docs at python, josh.r
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Remove documentation and internal use of the RESTRICTED constants for PyMemberDef's flags field
versions: Python 3.8

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue36355>
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