[feature] Type Hints in Conan API

[stackfun]

What is your suggestion?

Hi! I started migrating our codebase from Conan v1 to Conan v2 and the python interface is a lot nicer for sure.

It would be even more awesome if the API's had type hints! It will likely increase productivity of your team (definitely for developers like me), and would also eliminate a whole class of bugs 👍

Have you read the CONTRIBUTING guide?

• I've read the CONTRIBUTING guide

[AbrilRBS]

Hi @stackfun thanks a lot for your request!

Your suggestion is totally valid and it's not something we have forgotten about. The main reason about it being missing is because it's an experimental feature and we have skipped documenting it (See how its docs page is empty, for example) as to avoid users relying too much on it until it was not mature enough.

So rest assured that once the team feels it's "there", we'll make sure to have some good quality documentation on it, and that will include type hints, because as you said, they help so much (I miss them a ton too when developing extensions for conan-extensions, so I share your pain) :)

[mrbean-bremen]

Just for clarification: I guess closing this means that type hints won't be implemented?
(I know that it would not be an easy task anyway given the heavy reliance on dynamic features in conan)

[AbrilRBS]

@mrbean-bremen the idea was to mark this as not a specific objective, but something to be done eventually/as it comes up, but after talking with the team we are going to push some at least some improvements in each release, both typing, cleanup, and documenting, starting with Conan 2.20, thanks!

[mrbean-bremen]

the idea was to mark this as not a specific objective, but something to be done eventually/as it comes up

From experience I can say that this kind of objective usually means "will never be done", so kudos for making this a more official goal - this will really be helpful!

[memsharded]

Done some progress for Conan 2.20 release:

• Cleanup upload/download subapis #18790
• Eng/config api #18709
• Document ListAPI #18726
• Hide subapi attributes #18736

Moving this ticket to next 2.21 release, to keep doing this effort

[memsharded]

This release we have put a large effort to stabilize the PackagesLists interfaces, it required more work than expected:

• Stabilize PackagesList API #18833

Moving now to next 2.22