YAMLFileCatalog `text` argument is broken

[Jim Kitchen]

YAMLFileCatalog(path=None, text=None, autoreload=True, **kwargs)

The text argument that is broken. Attempting to pass a YAML string leads to several errors:

• self._dir is not set
  • This is only set further down in _load()
• self.getenv is not set
  • This is set during base Catalog.__init__()

To make it work, YAMLFileCatalog.__init__ would need to look like:

self.path = path
if text:
    self._dir = "text_only"     # <-- this is new
    self.autoreload = False
else:
    self.autoreload = autoreload  # set this to False if don't want reloads
self.filesystem = kwargs.pop('fs', None)
self.access = "name" not in kwargs
super(YAMLFileCatalog, self).__init__(**kwargs)
if text:                                      # <-- this is new
    self.name = self.name or "yaml_text_cat"  # <-- this is new
    self.parse(text)                          # <-- this was moved

Can we remove it?

Should this be fixed? Or should the text=None argument simply be removed?

All the tests pass with it gone, so unless a dependent package is using this argument (which seems unlikely with the broken state), I propose that it should be removed.

[Martin Durant]

It seems that it should probably be removed if it doesn't work and isn't tested. Maybe the argument should be kept in the signature for one release cycle and a depr error given if it is not None. Given that text can be put into a io.String/BytesIO or into fsspec's memory:// filesystem, there really isn't a reason to have another code path.

[Jim Kitchen]

I'll add the deprecation warning for now. We can remove the argument after the next release.