Special-casing Name(str) constructor to call from_text() [bad idea fair]

[pspacek]

Upfront apologies! This might very well be a bad idea and is definitelly a breaking change, but it is an itch I want to scratch so bad I will propose it anyway.

Perceived problem

For me, one of least ergonomic parts of API I use every day is dns.name.from_text("something.test."), which is veeeery long. My options without changing dnspython are:

• from dns.name import from_text - ambiguous for causal reader and still long
• from dns.name import from_text as ft- even worse
• subclass dns.name.Name to handle str argument specially and do equivalent of from_text on it

All of them are totally doable but it causes proliferation of hacks in all scripts using Name objects as I and my coworkers rarely want to have dns.name.from_text() all over the place.

The Bad Idea

Change Name __init__() to special-case arguments of type str. Something along those lines:

    def __init__(self, labels: Iterable[Union[bytes, str]]):
        if isinstance(labels, (str, bytes)):
            labels = from_text_guts(labels, origin=None)

This would allow a consistent 'shorthand' to be used across all projects:

from dns.name import Name

Name("cool.example.")

I did not explore all implications, but I hope it explains the idea.

[rthalley]

I take your point, and it's kind of consistent with shortcuts we do elsewhere. But if we did this, we'd need to have an origin (so you could make a relative name and a codec (i.e. the other from_text() parameters)