[Python-Dev] Closing the Clinic output format debate (at least for now)

[Nick Coghlan]

On 17 January 2014 08:01, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> I am tired of being the only blocker. So I withdraw my preference. Do
> what you all can agree on without me.

I had been staying out of the debate because I haven't had time to
participate in the derby yet (if nobody has claimed the builtins yet,
I was planning to do that this weekend). However, reviewing the
changes for http://bugs.python.org/issue20189 has now been enough to
convince me that a separate generated file is the way to go.

My rationale is because of the way it affects the code review process:
with a separate file, I can skip to the next file in the review as
soon as I see ".clinic" in the file name. We may even be able to teach
Reitveld to skip over clinic files (or at least suggest skipping them)
automatically.

With the current intermingled hand written + generated format, I can't
tell just from the file name whether or not there are manual changes I
need to review. Fortunately, in this particular case, Larry provided a
list of the files with real changes in them, but I now think it makes
more sense to instead bake the "this is all generated code, if you
have reviewed the input changes and trust argument clinic to do the
right thing, you can just skip reviewing it" notification directly
into the filenames.

Cheers,
Nick.

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