sphobjinv truncates silently some labels

[ahonorat]

Hello,

while using SymPy, I've tried sphobjinv on an incorrect objects.inv file containing extra line breaks.
Apparently sphobjinv silently truncates the faulty lines following extra line breaks.

A MWE is available in this SymPy issue
(see the end of first post)

Not sure if intended, but this might worth raising a warning when parsing those faulty lines.

Thanks for the lib!

[bskinn]

Thanks for raising this, @ahonorat!

I've thought about this on and off. On one hand, this is the sort of thing worth notifying users about. However, it's something that users can't actually do anything about, directly, and if sphobjinv emitted this sort of warning by default, it would make its output irritatingly noisy.

So, the 'this is good for users to know about' angle argues for emitting warnings, and emitting them by default; but the 'it's noisy, and users likely can't fix it' angle argues for making any warnings non-default... but then, if there's no warning that something is amiss, users won't know that they should run sphobjinv with warnings enabled. Chicken-and-egg problem. And, on the whole, I lean pretty strongly toward not noise-ifying the sphobjinv output.

Instead of emitting warnings, I'm inclined to keep sphobjinv's behavior unchanged (no warnings during convert or suggest invocations), but implement #317. If a user is going to have to make a special invocation of sphobjinv to check for problems with an objects.inv, might as well make it a distinct, narrowly-targeted invocation. As well -- I'm inclined to implement #317 using a plugin system, which would open the door to an ecosystem of plugin packages for sphobjinv check, similar to the constellation of flake8-xyz packages that are out there.

But, I'm interested to hear your thoughts/perspective on it.

[ahonorat]

Right, I agree on everything you said: a specific check tool as issued in #317 would be great!

Integrating the checker into a linter would be a plus but certainly requires more work ... I would start simple instead ;)
I don't have time to work on this unfortunately :/ Thank you for your reply about the why and how of this behaviour!