[gentoo-portage-dev] equery: RFC and code review

[Douglas Anderson <dja@gendja.com>]

Hi all,

It's been a few months since we first discussed refactoring equery on
this list and I think made pretty good time and I'm reasonably happy
with it. So I'm throwing out to you all. I've tried to keep a running
list of visible changes as I went along, but I'm sure I've missed some
things. You can read that here:

http://code.google.com/p/genscripts/source/browse/equery/trunk/equery/CHANGELOG

My primary goals for the refactorization were:
* Modularize
* Clean up the UI
* Rewrite a more solid option handler
* Eliminate as much duplicated code as possible
* Clean up slop and bitrot, follow clean coding standards and style
guidelines wherever possible
* Break up large functions, write docstrings for all functions
* Get code set for Python 2.6 (tested in 2.5 and 2.6) and prepare
smooth upgrade for Py3k.
* Create a more consistent experience for the user.

This last point is surely where the most contention will stem from, so
let me argue my position. All modules except for list, check and size
display the help message when called without input (ex: equery uses).
This makes sense. It's what most other programs do. It's what emerge
does. It's what eselect does. It's the neighborly thing to do.

However these three exceptions go and start a time-consuming process
which is of very limited usefulness. With a cold cache, each process
takes at least 30 seconds. I imagine that 99 percent of people who
type 'equery list' do it by accident. And who needs to see the size of
every installed package? And checksum every installed package? Almost
useless except to a select few people who know what they're doing.

So I took the liberty of changing the default behavior of these three
modules to be more in line with the rest of equery and the world. Each
of the three displays deprecation warning explaining how to recreate
the old default behavior. I can't imagine anyone objecting outright to
this, considering there will always be more than one version of
gentoolkit in the tree (there are 6 now) so it'd be a long time before
anyone was forced into the new behavior.

That's it. For anyone interested, please read the link above and let
me know if you like it/hate it/want something else done.

For python programmers, I'd appreciate a quick code review and any
comments/criticism whatsoever (I really like criticism).

Thanks in advance,
-Doug