[Python-Dev] How far to go with user-friendliness

[Ron Adam]

On 07/19/2015 11:52 AM, Ethan Furman wrote:
> Seems to me a lot of fuss could have been avoided by just acknowledging
> that a mistake may have been made, and asking for patches if anybody cared
> enough about it.

I'm not sure it's a mistake, but it may not be the best way to do what the 
"alias check" does.   That is, check for "unsafe" methods that may use 
"assert" in methods that start with assert or assret.  It's a name 
convention check only.

The use of "assret" may be because a developer used it in place of assert 
for a large project to avoid overwriting inherited methods accidentally and 
asked for it.  (that was suggested in this thread at one point.)  But I'm 
not able to confirm that.  It does sound reasonable though.  The check for 
it doesn't auto correct anything or alter anything outside of how the mock 
responds to existing methods. So it's not as bad as it sounds.  (But not as 
good either.)

A possibly better alternative is to have a different way to check if 
functions and methods use "assert".  Then the check by name convention 
(which is not dependable anyway) isn't needed.

Possibly adding a function, uses_assert(...), to the inspect module would 
be good.   To allow that to work, may need a flag set on function objects 
if they contain assert even if the module is compiled in optimise mode. 
(Is it doable?  Or maybe there is another way?)

Cheers,
    Ron