[Python-Dev] PEP 3003 - Python Language Moratorium

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Nov 6, 2009, at 4:52 PM, exarkun at twistedmatrix.com wrote:

> On 09:48 pm, rdmurray at bitdance.com wrote:
>> On Fri, 6 Nov 2009 at 15:48, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
>>

>>> Documentation would be great, but then you have to get people to  
>>> read the documentation and that's kind of tricky.  Better would be  
>>> for every project on PyPI to have a score which listed warnings  
>>> emitted with each version of Python.  People love optimizing for  
>>> stuff like that and comparing it.
>>>
>>> I suspect that even if all warnings were completely silent by  
>>> default, developers would suddenly become keenly interested in  
>>> fixing them if there were a metric like that publicly posted  
>>> somewhere :).
>>
>> +1, but somebody needs to write the code...
>
> How would you collect this information?  Would you run the test  
> suite for each project?  This would reward projects with small or  
> absent test suites. ;)



*I* would not collect this information, as I am far enough behind on  
other projects ;-) but I if I were to advise someone *else* as to how  
to do it, I'd probably add a feature to the 'warnings' module where  
users could opt-in (sort of like popcon.debian.org) to report warnings  
encountered during normal invocations of any of their Python programs.

I would also advise such a hypothetical data-gathering project to  
start with a buildbot doing coverage runs; any warning during the test  
suite would be 1 demerit, any warning during an actual end-user run of  
the application *not* caught by the test suite would be 1000  
demerits :).

And actually it would make more sense if this were part of an overall  
quality metric, like http://pycheesecake.org/ proposes (although I  
think that cheesecake's current metric is not really that great, the  
idea is wonderful).