Attributes of Python classes missing

[JukkaL]

Some classes are missing attributes in the stubs (e.g. quotes of shlex.shlex).

[ashleyh]

I can think of 4 ways to do this, none of which are particularly easy or
certain to be accurate:

• Parsing the source code
• Importing the class and then disassembling the code objects
• Importing the class, patching getattr and setattr to record which
  attributes are referred to, then running the tests for that class and
  hoping that all relevant attributes are covered
• Somehow scraping the documentation

On 24 January 2013 18:00, Jukka Lehtosalo [email protected] wrote:

Some classes are missing attributes in the stubs (e.g. quotes of
shlex.shlex).

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/5.

[JukkaL]

Here's a fifth way (an alternative to the __getattr__ way): you could transform the test suite to record all attribute accesses. So each expression of form x.y would be transformed into something like __checked_getattr(x, 'y'). This would work for C extension classes as well.

This (or the __getattr__ approach) could be used for dynamic type inference as well. We could also transform calls to __checked_call(callee, args...) to infer argument and return types (and method names).

[JukkaL]

There probably isn't a reliable way of inferring all attributes. But I think that's fine; a 97% or 99% solution would still save a lot of effort. Besides, a lot of library functionality is used very rarely (though we might have the problem of the "long tail"), and it's easy to see if commonly used functionality is missing since code using the module will just not work. The rest could be added manually over time as people find gaps in the stubs.