From 9ef43dd7ad3427f579285e100cc78de124213815 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: John Keeping Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2013 20:47:32 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] CodingGuidelines: add Python coding guidelines These are kept short by simply deferring to PEP-8. Most of the Python code in Git is already very close to this style (some things in contrib/ are not). Rationale for version suggestions: - Amongst the noise in [1], there isn't any disagreement about using 2.6 as a base (see also [2]), although Brandon Casey recently added support for 2.4 and 2.5 to git-p4 [3]. - Restricting ourselves to 2.6+ makes aiming for Python 3 compatibility significantly easier [4]. - Advocating Python 3 support in all scripts is currently unrealistic because: - 'p4 -G' provides output in a format that is very hard to use with Python 3 (and its documentation claims Python 3 is unsupported). - Mercurial does not support Python 3. - Bazaar does not support Python 3. - But we should try to make new scripts compatible with Python 3 because all new Python development is happening on version 3 and the Python community will eventually stop supporting Python 2 [5]. - Python 3.1 is required to support the 'surrogateescape' error handler for encoding/decodng filenames to/from Unicode strings and Python 3.0 is not longer supported. [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/210329 [2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/210429 [3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/214579 [4] http://docs.python.org/3.3/howto/pyporting.html#try-to-support-python-2-6-and-newer-only [5] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0404/ Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano --- Documentation/CodingGuidelines | 14 ++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 14 insertions(+) diff --git a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines index 69f7e9b76c..432c6cdff0 100644 --- a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines +++ b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines @@ -179,6 +179,20 @@ For C programs: - Use Git's gettext wrappers to make the user interface translatable. See "Marking strings for translation" in po/README. +For Python scripts: + + - We follow PEP-8 (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/). + + - As a minimum, we aim to be compatible with Python 2.6 and 2.7. + + - Where required libraries do not restrict us to Python 2, we try to + also be compatible with Python 3.1 and later. + + - When you must differentiate between Unicode literals and byte string + literals, it is OK to use the 'b' prefix. Even though the Python + documentation for version 2.6 does not mention this prefix, it has + been supported since version 2.6.0. + Writing Documentation: Every user-visible change should be reflected in the documentation. -- 2.11.4.GIT