Hacker News Reader

Comment by jameskilton | Hacker News Reader

Yikes! That's a horrible thing for a library to do to its users. This definitely should be changed in the library.

I noticed that no such Issue exists, so I opened one. https://github.com/boto/boto/issues/2078

James,

It looks like a HEAD request can fulfill the same purpose at a much lower cost (this is mentioned by a comment on your Issue: (comment by kislyuk)

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/RESTBucketHEA...

Shall I make the change and pull request it? I didn't want to duplicate effort.

Aye, this does look like the right way to handle this functionality. I'm not planning on doing a PR so have at it.

Working on it now.

Don't you have too much to do?

We should all be happy that amongst those things he considers "too much to do" is contribute to open source projects.

Agreed!

I took the nickname because I always take on more than I have time for, yet find the time to complete everything that I take on.

No offense intended, just enjoyed the relationship between your nick and your jumping on a new task. I don't actually mean to discourage!

Not discouraged at all! :)

I kind of agree with garnaat's reply, if they just suddenly change the default from TRUE to FALSE they're going to break backwards compatibility with anyone using the library and worse still in a really subtle way!

All they can really do at this stage is add a warning to the documentation and hope that new people using the library figure out the significance.

This is what major version numbers are for.

Or issue an actual runtime warning: http://docs.python.org/2/library/warnings.html

That's why you should avoid using default arguments in library functions.

Great point! I have never heard that, but it makes perfect sense. Hopefully I will remember in the future.

I don't agree, you should just know what they are. Defaults are helpful.

Until they change, and your code breaks, and you have to go figure out why. The point of not (silently) using defaults is that as long as you're explicit with your arguments, you won't get surprised by changing defaults. Of course, you might get surprised by any number of other changes, but you can at least reduce your failure surface area a little bit :-)

We have been using this in production for over 2 years at scale and just cross checked to have this enabled.

Totally agree, that this should be default False!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com