Missing files are silently ignored

[Rijgersberg]

I observe that missing files are silently ignored when using load_name:

import confidence


config = confidence.load_name('this_file_does_not_exist')
print(config)

-->

<confidence.models.Configuration keys={}>

Process finished with exit code 0

From the documentation in io.loadf() and #21 it seems to be that this is not the intended behavior.

Unfortunately, I could not immediatly figure out why the code is misbehaving: it looks fine to me but my debugger is failing to implement the proper breakpoints inside of Confidence.

[akaIDIOT]

load_name never explicitly loads files, whereas loadf does. load_name uses loadf and uses NotConfigured as the default for files that don't exist. As load_name will attempt to load a large number of files, most of which would / should not exist, what would be the intended behaviour from your point of view? :)

[akaIDIOT]

Just thought of something that might touch on this point: letting load_name validate the result of what it loaded. I can think of a few variants of this:

• None: no verification of the result (effectively the current behaviour);
• non-empty: caller expects there to be something, not an empty Configuration / NotConfigured;
• callable: caller-supplied function that takes a look at the loaded result, raises errors / returns False to make confidence raise an error.

Not too hard to implement, but a reason to not make any effort towards this could be that these are all fairly trivial to do for user code too (empty Configuration is falsy, a callable is easy to call after load_name).

[Rijgersberg]

Yeah custom validation can be left to the user I guess.

What I think I (and let's ask around, because I also thing others) naively assume that if Confidence cannot find any file that matches an entry in to load_name, that an error is raised.

We figured this out because we had a misspelling of a name that was fed into load_name, which was causing weird configuration errors far down the line.

[HHoofs]

nomination for closure

[akaIDIOT]

At least the default behaviour as it is right now needs no changes, I'd say. We could add a info level log line that indicates the size of the top level or something along those lines? Discovering that requires someone to enable logging though, that might be a taller assumption than adding if configuration := load_name(...): to a script... 🤔