[reportlab-users] No usage of recursiveGet/Set/DelAttr

[Claude Paroz]

OK, fair, I understand your position.

One way to do it progressively would be to show deprecation warnings 
when using the functions, before removing them in a future version.
Or simply wait and do it for a future 4.0 version, where the major 
version number may signify library users that some compatibility might 
be broken (and I detected several other unused functions in the 
lib/utils.py file that could be purged in the same time).

But I also understand that the effort might not be worth doing. That's 
your maintainer's privilege to make such choices :-)

Claude

Le 01.03.22 à 16:33, Andy Robinson a écrit :
> We have discussed this.  How do we know that there is nobody out there 
> using the function?  Our graphics framework and object hierarchy are 
> quite nested, and so this function was quite useful to us and might have 
> been to others.   There are probably tens of thousands of projects using 
> ReportLab including many in-house ones we have no way to even know about.
> 
> Regrettably we did not have any kind of strict separation of external 
> API and internal details when we started, and many times in the last 20 
> years we have 'tidied something up' and broken somebody else's 
> application.     We feel that unless something is actually broken, or 
> there is a risk, it's safer not to change things for the sake of change.
> 
> There is a more elegant implementation of recursiveSetAttr on 
> StackOverflow, but more elegant can also mean "harder to understand" so 
> we see no need to change it now.
> 
> Best Regards
> 
> Andy
> 
> On Tue, 1 Mar 2022 at 07:48, Claude Paroz <claude at 2xlibre.net 
> <mailto:claude at 2xlibre.net>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi Andy,
> 
>     Then maybe it would just be a matter of moving the function(s) to your
>     internal commercial code?
> 
>     Claude
> 
>     Le 28.02.22 à 14:23, Andy Robinson a écrit :
>      > Claude, I see that recursiveSetAttr is used by our commercial
>     product
>      > `rml2pdf`.  It's possible we could remove them, as python
>     provides much
>      > better tools for that kind of thing than it did in 2001.   We
>     have to
>      > scan a few other repositories to see if there are other uses
>     before we
>      > can be sure.
>      >
>      > - Andy Robinson
>      >
>      > On Mon, 28 Feb 2022 at 13:17, Claude Paroz <claude at 2xlibre.net
>     <mailto:claude at 2xlibre.net>
>      > <mailto:claude at 2xlibre.net <mailto:claude at 2xlibre.net>>> wrote:
>      >
>      >     Hi,
>      >
>      >     I didn't find any usage of
>      >     recursiveGetAttr/recursiveSetAttr/recursiveDelAttr in reportlab
>      >     public code.
>      >     So if they are not used in other client code, I guess they
>     could simply
>      >     be removed, as the attached patch is doing.
>      >
>      >     Claude
>      >     --
>      > www.2xlibre.net <http://www.2xlibre.net>