* Jim Fulton <jim@zope.com> [2010-04-20 20:35]:
On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 4:46 AM, Lennart Regebro <regebro@gmail.com> wrote:
And here is another interesting experiment: svn+ssh://regebro@svn.zope.org/repos/main/zope.testing/branches/regebro-doctest-patching It replaces the custom doctest.py with monkey-patches.
Benefits: We don't have to maintain a separate doctest.py, and we get the bugfixes from Python.
Strong -1.
Monkey patching should be used as a last resort. Monkey patching the standard library is likely to make us look like jack asses.
That might be so. I don't share that position, but I have a different point that I want to make: Regardless of whether monkey-patching the stdlib is or isn't a Bad Thing(tm), I think Lennart's approach is an *improvement* over the previous situation where we copied a file from the stdlib wholesale[1] -- in my opinion that's definitely worse than a monkey-patch. Wolfgang [1] I know, I know, it was actually the other way around. But still.