[Python-Dev] Proposal to revert r54204 (splitext change)

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Phillip J. Eby schrieb:
> That much is obvious.  But I haven't seen any explanation as to why 
> explicitly-documented and explicitly-tested behavior should be treated 
> as a bug in policy terms, just because people don't like the documented 
> and tested behavior.

It's not "just" that people disliked the behavior. The majority of those
that commented agreed that the current behavior is incorrect. Some also
observed that the online documentation was underspecified, and indeed
allowed for that change. So this is a bug fix, even though the old test
case explicitly tested for the presence of the bug, and even though the
doc string explicitly documented the old behavior. They were all 
consistent, but they were consistently wrong.

The bug fix may also break existing applications. Hence it cannot go
into 2.5.1 but has to wait for 2.6.

> So far, the only policy justification I've seen you give was along the 
> lines of, "I volunteered to do it, so I get to decide".

It's more than that. I conducted a poll, and here people were largely
in favor of that change. Had they been largely in opposition, I would
have rejected the patch.

However, *some* action is necessary. The patch was sitting there for
a long time already, and it is unfair to the submitter to not act just
because you cannot decide. The bug report was even older.

> Thus, either way, there needs to be some *other* justification for the 
> original change.

But I said that many times. I changed it because the old behavior (and
the old documentation) was buggy, and the (revised version of) the
patch fixed that bug.

Regards,
Martin

P.S. If you apply the same effort to all changes that are constantly
being made to Python, you will find that you will need to revert many
of them.