tree a27f246b3c1604aebecb055e6aac8249227c8434
parent 7e09dd686f9dc8ee75453fc400e0366cd4c9d3e2
author John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> 1710516175 +0100
committer Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> 1713945834 +0200

qapi/parser: demote QAPIExpression to Dict[str, Any]

Dict[str, object] is a stricter type, but with the way that code is
currently arranged, it is infeasible to enforce this strictness.

In particular, although expr.py's entire raison d'être is normalization
and type-checking of QAPI Expressions, that type information is not
"remembered" in any meaningful way by mypy because each individual
expression is not downcast to a specific expression type that holds all
the details of each expression's unique form.

As a result, all of the code in schema.py that deals with actually
creating type-safe specialized structures has no guarantee (myopically)
that the data it is being passed is correct.

There are two ways to solve this:

(1) Re-assert that the incoming data is in the shape we expect it to be, or
(2) Disable type checking for this data.

(1) is appealing to my sense of strictness, but I gotta concede that it
is asinine to re-check the shape of a QAPIExpression in schema.py when
expr.py has just completed that work at length. The duplication of code
and the nightmare thought of needing to update both locations if and
when we change the shape of these structures makes me extremely
reluctant to go down this route.

(2) allows us the chance to miss updating types in the case that types
are updated in expr.py, but it *is* an awful lot simpler and,
importantly, gets us closer to type checking schema.py *at
all*. Something is better than nothing, I'd argue.

So, do the simpler dumber thing and worry about future strictness
improvements later.

Signed-off-by: John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
Message-ID: <20240315152301.3621858-20-armbru@redhat.com>