what is inspect.py and what is it aimed for?

[nitawa (NabilG)]

Dear experts,
in ParaView 5.13, what is the inspect [1] module used for - I don’t see any entry in the documentation about it. Does it correspond to the site-packages/paraview/inspect.py file ?
If this is the case, IMHO, the name is a little bit error-prone since inspect is also the name of a module in numpy (in 1.26 for instance, one has: numpy.compat.inspect). This can lead to some serious issues if the PYTHONPATH is expanded.

Thanks for your valuable feedback.

[1] https://www.paraview.org/paraview-docs/v5.13.0/python/paraview.inspect.html

[cory.quammen (Cory Quammen (Kitware))]

@nitawa

Does it correspond to the site-packages/paraview/inspect.py file ?

Yes. It just prints the ParaView version and pythonpath entry, e.g., on my mac I can run

> /Applications/ParaView-5.13.3.app/Contents/bin/pvpython -m paraview.inspect
version: 3.10
pythonpath entry: /Applications/ParaView-5.13.3.app/Contents/Python

@nitawa

If this is the case, IMHO, the name is a little bit error-prone since inspect is also the name of a module in numpy (in 1.26 for instance, one has: numpy.compat.inspect). This can lead to some serious issues if the PYTHONPATH is expanded.

I’m not sure if I understand why this would cause a problem, unless you import both numpy.compat.* and paraview.* and get a name conflict.

[nitawa (NabilG)]

@cory.quammen

I’m not sure if I understand why this would cause a problem, unless you import both numpy.compat.* and paraview.* and get a name conflict.

as you wrote: unless you import. IMHO, it would make sens to have some different naming here like e.g. inspector .
Thanks.

[cory.quammen (Cory Quammen (Kitware))]

It’s not possible to anticipate collisions of names with every other python package one might import all the symbols from. Putting it under the paraview package is a reasonable way to guard against such collisions.