[TIP] Coming changes to unittest2 plugins

holger krekel holger at merlinux.eu
Mon Sep 27 14:54:23 PDT 2010


On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 23:02 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> >> 3/ For this specific work there's no need to make the call
> >> performant/fast since the location is loaded once.
> >
> > My concern is static analysability not performance.
> >
> > Summary of my POV: i think there are good reasons to use specifications
> > like "x.y:ABC" in .ini or .cfg files instead of the seemingly nicer "x.y.ABC"
> > because the latter is ambigous and needs more information and/or calls into the
> > import system to extract the meaning of the dotted names.  The fact that is is
> > possible to extract the information or that the latter is a valid Python
> > expression does not per-se make it a better specification IMHO.
> 
> The ambiguity is not really in the notation but in the usage we do of
> that information.
> 
> Basically you are saying that is ambiguous because it's not easy to
> convert back to the old format.

That's at least the current use case, indeed.  I consider this
conversion important for helping distutils2 to gain traction. 

> But it seems that you don't have any practical use case for the colon
> notation other that staying compatible with Setuptools.

Not right now, true.

> So, I have a proposal: if I write the function that reverts x.y.ABC to
> x.y.ABC for your setuptools compat code,
> will you agree on the dotted notation ?

Don't worry.  I am ok if we go ahead with using dotted addresses.  
I agree they do look somewhat natural.  Where needed i will do 
workarounds and obviously occassionally twitter some random rants 
about the magicness of distutils2 and unittests2 :) 

cheers,
holger



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