Why tarfile.TarFile.gzopen is not in the online documentation?

[Lars Gustäbel]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 09:37:19AM +0100, Baptiste Lepilleur wrote:
> I stumbled uppon this and find it somewhat odd: some class methods of
> TarFile and TarInfo do not appears in either the online documentation or
> search while they have a doc string:
> 
> http://docs.python.org/search.html?q=gzopen
> http://docs.python.org/library/tarfile.html?highlight=tarfile#tarfile.TarFile
> 
> See script at the end for list of class methods.
> 
> Is this "by design" or is there some an odd bug in doc generation lurking
> around? This somehow seem to be specific to module tarfile. Fraction
> classmethod from_float() is available in the documentation and found by a
> search for example...

First of all, Python's module documentation is not generated from module
docstrings, each module has its own rst text file in the documentation tree
instead.

But to answer your question: Yes, this is intentional. The TarFile class has
three classmethods taropen(), gzopen(), and bz2open() each for a specific
compression method. These three are used internally by the TarFile.open()
classmethod and are not intended to be called directly. The TarFile.open()
method is the one that is publicly documented and supposed to be used. It
decides which of the three methods to use based on the mode argument and
does many more other high-level things as well.

Regards,

-- 
Lars Gustäbel
lars at gustaebel.de

I do not care to belong to a club that
accepts people like me as members.
(Groucho Marx)