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In contributing.rst, encourage kwonly args and minimizing public APIs. #14545

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In contributing.rst, encourage kwonly args and minimizing public APIs. #14545

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17 changes: 17 additions & 0 deletions doc/devel/contributing.rst
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Expand Up @@ -349,6 +349,23 @@ C/C++ extensions
docstrings, and the Numpydoc format is well understood in the
scientific Python community.

New public APIs
---------------

Public APIs added to Matplotlib are bound by backwards compatibility, and
therefore cumbersome to change. Therefore, when adding new functionality, try
to add as little public API as possible. In particular, make sure that helper
methods and internal attributes are private (i.e., start with an underscore).
Remember that any non-private method can be directly called by the end user,
and any non-private attribute can be directly set!
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I'd probably leave out this sentence. It is extraneous and doesn't really explain why this is a "bad thing" (it can also confuse some contributors because they'll notice that they can do exactly the same thing with private methods and attributes).

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I'm not particularly in love with the wording here, but I do want to stress that point extremely strongly: if an attribute is public, the implementation should be robust against the end user modifying it; otherwise, make it private, or hide it behind a getter or a property.
If you have a better wording I'm all ears :)

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Or add a "And therefore once we have released that API the behavior, arguments, and names can not be changed without going through a multi-version deprecation process." ?


In order to make it easier to evolve APIs, consider making as many arguments
keyword-only as possible.

.. seealso:: `API Evolution the Right Way -- Add Parameters Compatibly`__

__ https://emptysqua.re/blog/api-evolution-the-right-way/#adding-parameters

.. _keyword-argument-processing:

Keyword argument processing
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