Undocumented feature for INSTALLED_APPS settings

[Francesco Mari]

Hi,

I've read source code for django.conf package and as of Django 1.3
INSTALLED_APPS can accept wildcards for application names (e.g.
django.contrib.*). It seems that the official documentation doesn't
mention it in the Available Settings section.

Am I wrong?

[Aymeric Augustin]

Hello,

I checked the SVN history. This "feature" was never documented, even before the reorganization at r8506. It appears in django/conf/__init__.py when magic-removal is merged (r2809).

We just discussed it on IRC, and the consensus is that it dates back to before Django was open-sourced. It was probably only used at World Online.

In my opinion, it's an anti-feature:
1 - It's un-pythonic: in essence, it's equivalent to an filesystem-based implementation of "from <package> import *", which was not rejected in Python for a good reason [1]
2 - like "from <module> import *", it's not explicit,
3 - you don't add apps to your settings file every day, so there's little to gain.

I think it should be deprecated; since it was never documented, we could even remove it outright.

Best regards,

--
Aymeric Augustin.

[1] http://www.python.org/doc/essays/packages.html - section "Importing * From a Package"

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[Aymeric Augustin]

On 12 juin 2011, at 22:35, Aymeric Augustin wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I checked the SVN history. This "feature" was never documented, even before the reorganization at r8506. It appears in django/conf/__init__.py when magic-removal is merged (r2809).
>
> We just discussed it on IRC, and the consensus is that it dates back to before Django was open-sourced. It was probably only used at World Online.
>
> In my opinion, it's an anti-feature:
> 1 - It's un-pythonic: in essence, it's equivalent to an filesystem-based implementation of "from <package> import *", which was not rejected in Python for a good reason [1]

Argh! I wanted to write: "which was rejected in Python for a good reason"

[Carl Meyer]

On 06/12/2011 03:35 PM, Aymeric Augustin wrote:
> I checked the SVN history. This "feature" was never documented, even
> before the reorganization at r8506. It appears in
> django/conf/__init__.py when magic-removal is merged (r2809).
>
> We just discussed it on IRC, and the consensus is that it dates back
> to before Django was open-sourced. It was probably only used at World
> Online.
>
> In my opinion, it's an anti-feature: 1 - It's un-pythonic: in
> essence, it's equivalent to an filesystem-based implementation of
> "from <package> import *", which was not rejected in Python for a
> good reason [1] 2 - like "from <module> import *", it's not
> explicit, 3 - you don't add apps to your settings file every day, so
> there's little to gain.
>
> I think it should be deprecated; since it was never documented, we
> could even remove it outright.

I agree with all of this. I would be in favor of simply removing the
wildcard feature with a note in the release notes, unless someone pops
up to argue that it's more widely-used than we think and it should be
deprecated instead, in which case I think a normal deprecation path is a
fine alternative.

Carl

[Jannis Leidel]

+1 on the strategy.

Jannis

[Aymeric Augustin]

I have created a ticket and a patch to implement Carl's recommendation:
https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/16247

Could someone review it?