[Twisted-Python] Re: [Twisted-commits] r22428 - Deprecation API for functions and methods.

glyph at divmod.com glyph at divmod.com
Thu Jan 31 11:11:10 EST 2008


On 02:45 pm, exarkun at divmod.com wrote:
>What's the right way to get a string describing a Version now?  It's an 
>even
>harder decision to make than it was before.  Is it:
>
>  * str(Version(...))
>  * repr(Version(...))
>  * Version(...).base()
>  * Version(...).short()
>  * getVersionString(Version(...))
>
>Can we do something to make this better?

This collection is super ad-hoc.  Let me try to express some of the 
requirements that lead to the current confusion:

  * Sometimes you want a string that is formatted for use at a REPL, 
which can be eval'd to give the user the idea that it is a structured 
object and how they can build something similar (repr())
  * sometimes you want something that's human-readable and expresses all 
the information available about the version (str()).  The square 
brackets probably come from the fact that I was playing WoW at the time, 
and square brackets meant "this is a thing, not just something a guy 
said".  I was thinking you'd want to see like [Twisted Epic Spaulders of 
the Owl] for the version number.  (Maybe a bad call.)
  * Sometimes you want just the version number in canonical format 
(x.y.z+dev) not the name of the package (.short())
  * I hypothesize that sometimes you want to omit the +dev part because 
you're trying to fit into a stricter format, but I don't really remember 
why .base() exists.

Was getVersionString added because the other string representations 
weren't "friendly" enough?  I guess the 'rUnknown' makes them look a 
little gnarly, but I'd actually like to see the SVN revision in the 
cases where it's present; the right thing to do to make it friendly 
would be to fix the entries-file parser.

Also, in any case, it should really be a method.  There's no reason to 
have a free function defined right after a class whose only argument is 
a single instance of that class :).




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