[Python-Dev] Support for PyGetSetDefs in pydoc
Georg Brandl
g.brandl at gmx.net
Thu Jul 20 21:32:58 CEST 2006
Barry Warsaw wrote:
> Why did I do this instead of trying to hunt down some existing getset
> or member descriptor? For one thing, there really aren't very good
> candidates for such objects in the built-in modules. You can't use
> objects like datetime.timedelta.days in types.py because datetime is
> not importable early enough for types.py to use it. Even if there
> were likely candidates, they would be accidents of implementation and
> it doesn't seem like a good idea to force force some future datetime
> maintainer to have to fix types.py when she decides that
> datetime.timedelta.days should be implemented in some other way.
>
> A 3rd party extension module doesn't work either because you really
> need the tie-in from types.py, inspect.py, and pydoc.py. You
> certainly don't want to go poking new values into types.py from the
> outside, and besides inspect.py and pydoc.py also need to learn about
> these fundamental built-in Python types.
>
> ISTM the most straightforward approach is to provide these types in a
> built-in C module, linked into the interpreter so types.py can get
> access to it as early as it needs to. Also, because the type that
> these descriptors are attached to cannot be instantiated from Python,
> they should be quite benign, existing only in order to give type()
> something to query.
Perhaps you could put the objects into _testcapi. That way no new module
has to be deployed (is _testcapi installed on every system?)
Georg
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