[Python-Dev] pep8 reasoning

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Apr 26 03:29:35 CEST 2014


On 25 April 2014 19:56, Florent <florent.xicluna at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2014-04-26 0:46 GMT+02:00 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>:
>> Florent is claiming the endorsement of the PEP 8 authors
>> and the consensus of python-dev for the tool's default behaviour
>> (as noted above, this makes it personal for me, as I am a
>> co-author of PEP 8).
>
> You're a co-author of PEP 8 since less than a year.
> I'm the maintainer of the pep8 tool since 2010.
>
> You should probably read the LICENSE file which is shipped with the
> pep8 too, and the disclaimer that I've posted previously.  Never I
> engage the responsibility of the authors of the PEP 8 document, and I
> don't give any guarantee of being a *strict* PEP 8 compliance tool.
>
> However, you should notice that your ticket in the tracker is opened
> for 2 months only, and I did not flagged it as being resolved.  As
> I've stated in my previous mail, I give priority to bugs over other
> requests.  And even if you think it is a critical bug for yourself, it
> did not appear like that for the thousands of people which used the
> library for the last few years.

I apologise for my impatience. As I stated in that issue, I really
*want* to be able to uncritically endorse pep8 for use on new Python
projects, as while I like pylint personally, I think it's too
complicated (and noisy by default) to recommend its use outside large
multi-developer projects where taking the time to set up a custom
config file is likely to pay off.

Hence it's frustrating to me that I can't currently recommend pep8 for
this use case, as the default behaviour includes rules I disagree with
(in particular, the ones that the examples in PEP 8 itself fail). I
believe the combination of the implied endorsement from the name of
the tool and an explicit endorsement from me saying "use this on your
projects" would imply that I agree with *all* the default behaviour,
and that simply isn't the case (E121 in particular is outright wrong,
since it violates the approach of aligning indented lines with an
opening parenthesis).

It seemed simple enough to me to say "yes, that makes sense, we can
make those warnings eventually, but it's not a high priority to do
so". That would put it back on me to craft a pull request to make the
change, and would be an entirely appropriate response when I'm asking
other people to do extra work.

That hasn't been my impression of the response I received to date
though - my impression of the response has been "we don't care about
your feelings". Defending PEP 8 against people who think it's overly
prescriptive is irritating enough, without having to also figure out
whether people are actually complaining about the PEP or about a tool
I didn't help write :(

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia


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