@jbornschein @nouiz Here's my proposal for dealing with unknown configurations. It gives a warning, but only if the unknown configuration is a likely typo. Otherwise it just silently ignores it. I prefer this over giving warnings each time a user doesn't import blocks.extras (regardless of whether this warning is given at import or at exit), but it's slightly more user-friendly than being entirely silent.

Good direction, but how do you define typo?

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 1:14 PM, Bart van Merriënboer <
[email protected]> wrote:

@jbornschein https://github.com/jbornschein @nouiz
https://github.com/nouiz Here's my proposal for dealing with unknown
configurations. It gives a warning, but only if the unknown configuration
is a likely typo. Otherwise it just silently ignores it. I prefer this over
giving warnings each time a user doesn't import blocks.extras (regardless
of whether this warning is given at imports or at exit), but it's slightly
more user-friendly than being entirely silent.

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#712 (comment).

I use difflib.get_close_matches with the default threshold of 0.6, which is quite sensitive (for example, some_other_backend is a match to log_backend). (Matching with edit-distance might be better, but that's not in the standard library.) For now, that seems to work well, because the few configurations we have are all quite different.

This seem good. I didn't know about that lib. I made a ticket in Theano about this: Theano/Theano#3021

I guess that works -- it solves the problem. And it uses a stdlib that I didn't know about.

But in general I feel a bit uncanny when it comes to "software wants to be clever about variable or configuration-option names". I think of configuration parsers as simple pieces of software that do something very deterministic and that should not surprise me. And when I ever see a message like "unknown configuration option" I would expect that I will always get such a warning. Not only when the given option is sufficiently similar to an actual option.

According to my judgement I would prefer to simply try to import blocks.extra. And rather deal with the surprises that might pop up as a result of that.