[twill] Using twill's builtin mechanize distribution throws AttributeError on _debug?

[John J Lee]

That line hasn't been there in mechanize since 2008 -- back then it knew 
much more about Python than it does now.  I'd guess that code worked with 
versions of Python that had been released at that time.  Now it's based on 
a fork of urllib2, so is less fragile to changes in Python.

I guess neither of us (me nor Titus) spend much time on this stuff these 
days.  Certainly mechanize is not dead but certainly resting pretty hard 
-- but still, it's seen a fair amount of change since 2008.  Speaking for 
myself more than Titus of course...


John

On Sun, 4 Sep 2011, Stephen McInerney wrote:

>
> Hi Titus,
>
> Can you look at that stacktrace though?
> mechanize attempted to call robotparser._debug() which dos not exist (on this version anyway)
> Is mechanize normally that flaky?
> I guess I could kludge a dummy robotparser._debug(), but that seems bad.
>
> Thanks,
> Stephen
>
>
>> Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2011 07:40:01 -0700
>> From: ctb at msu.edu
>> To: spmcinerney at hotmail.com
>> CC: twill at lists.idyll.org
>> Subject: Re: [twill] Using twill's builtin mechanize distribution throws	AttributeError on _debug?
>>
>> Hi Stephen,
>>
>> twill's built-in mechanize is rather old and out of date.  There should
>> be little or no internal state kept by twill itself; it's a really thin
>> wrapper around mechanize.  So you should be able to use it w/o any
>> problem.
>>
>> cheers,
>> --titus
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 02, 2011 at 12:45:38PM -0700, Stephen McInerney wrote:
>>>
>>> twill experts,
>>>
>>> I also posted this on StackOverflow, if you like to reply there:
>>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7278103/using-twills-builtin-mechanize-distribution-throws-attributeerror-on-debug
>>>
>>> Using twill's builtin mechanize distribution throws AttributeError on _debug?
>>>
>>> I use twill (0.9) and I want to also access its builtin mechanize distribution (on Python 2.6.6).
>>> I read all the documentation and I'm not clear whether they even support or recommend that, if so they certainly don't publicize it (you might like to document that).
>>> It seems you can do:
>>>
>>>     import _mechanize_dist as mechanize
>>>     br = mechanize.Browser()
>>>     br.open('http://www.yahoo.com')
>>>
>>> however mechanize throws the stupid AttributeError below on `robotparser._debug`. Should I not be trying to use it? or is it a 2.5/2.6 incompatibility?
>>> (Twill itself works fine: `twill.commands.go('http://www.yahoo.com')`)
>>>
>>>     Traceback (most recent call last):
>>>       File "<pyshell#19>", line 1, in <module>
>>>         br.open('http://www.yahoo.com')
>>>       File "C:\Dev\Python26\lib\site-packages\twill-0.9-py2.6.egg\twill\other_packages\_mechanize_dist\_mechanize.py", line 212, in open
>>>         return self._mech_open(url, data)
>>>       File "C:\Dev\Python26\lib\site-packages\twill-0.9-py2.6.egg\twill\other_packages\_mechanize_dist\_mechanize.py", line 238, in _mech_open
>>>         response = UserAgentBase.open(self, request, data)
>>>       File "C:\Dev\Python26\lib\site-packages\twill-0.9-py2.6.egg\twill\other_packages\_mechanize_dist\_opener.py", line 175, in open
>>>         req = meth(req)
>>>       File "C:\Dev\Python26\lib\site-packages\twill-0.9-py2.6.egg\twill\other_packages\_mechanize_dist\_http.py", line 440, in http_request
>>>         self.rfp.read()
>>>       File "C:\Dev\Python26\lib\site-packages\twill-0.9-py2.6.egg\twill\other_packages\_mechanize_dist\_http.py", line 387, in read
>>>         robotparser._debug("parse lines")
>>>     AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '_debug'
>>>
>>> (Last question is: I'm not aware of any caveats about using both twill and mechanize commands side-by-side?)
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Stephen
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> twill mailing list
>>> twill at lists.idyll.org
>>> http://lists.idyll.org/listinfo/twill
>>
>>
>> --
>> C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu
>