[Python-Dev] Deprecate codecs.open() and StreamWriter/StreamReader

[Victor Stinner]

Le vendredi 27 mai 2011 16:01:14, Nick Coghlan a écrit :
> On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:42 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> > Wrong order: first write a PEP, then discuss, then get approval,
> > then patch.
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> If another committer says "please revert and better justify this
> change" then we revert it. We don't get into commit wars.

I reverted my controversal commit.

> Something does need to be done to resolve the duplication of
> functionality between the io and codecs modules, but it is *far* from
> clear that deprecating chunks of the longer standing API is the right
> way to go about it.

Yes, StreamReader & friends are present in Python since Python 2.0.

> This is especially true given Guido's explicit
> direction following the issues with the PyCObject removal in 3.2 that
> we be *very* conservative about introducing additional
> incompatibilities between Python 2 and Python 3.

I did search for usage of these classes on the Internet, and except projects 
implementing their own codecs (and so implement their 
StreamReader/StreamWriter classes, even if they don't use it), I only found 
one project using directly StreamReader: pygment (*). I searched quickly, so 
don't trust these results :-) StreamReader & friends are used indirectly 
through codecs.open(). My patch changes codecs.open() to make it reuse open 
(io.TextIOWrapper), so the deprecation of StreamReader would not be noticed by 
most users.

I think that there are much more users of PyCObject than users using directly 
the StreamReader API (not through codecs.open()).

(*) I also found Sphinx, but I was wrong: it doesn't use StreamReader, it just 
has a full copy of the UTF-8-SIG codec which has a StreamReader class. I don't 
think that the class is used.

Victor