====== winsys

Enter WinSys: the Python Windows Administrator's Toolkit. A collection of modules with a consistent approach, wrapping the Windows API calls already exposed by pywin32, adding some with ctypes, and giving them all a pythonic feel. There's nothing here you couldn't do yourself with 10 minutes and a copy of the pywin32 and SDK docs. But it's all here already, and with a more Pythonish feel about it.

Design Principles

The following principles have directed the design of the modules and packages wherever possible:

• Make ad-hoc use possible and easy (and even attractive)
• Provide sensible defaults for the common cases, always allowing for more complex scenarios
• Put all constants into one place, grouping them according to their API usage
• Use the pywin32 functionality where available, supplementing it with ctypes where needed
• Assume a recent version of Python (2.5 at least)
• Make good use of context managers (with-statements)
• Have each object able to dump its contents and that of its children cleanly
• Maintain an object approach, but provide convenient module-level functions
• Have useful factory functions for classes, robustly accepting string or object parameters

Common Features

Most of the objects in winsys subclass the :class:core._WinSysObject class which offers sensible defaults and defines common functionality such as a dump function. In addition, the following features are common to many of the modules:

Pythonic Naming

This is mildly contentious, but the same naming convention has been used
throughout, following the ``lowercase_with_underscores`` convention widely
adopted in the Python community. The most widespread exception to this is
in the :mod:`constants` module, where Windows constants retain their
``UPPERCASE_WITH_UNDERSCORES`` names.

Module-level Functions

While a lot of use has been made of Python classes to wrap the function-driven Windows API, a lot of the functionality has been exposed as module-level convenience functions. So, for example, in the :mod:fs module, the :class:fs.File class offers a :meth:fs.File.copy method, but the same functionality is exposed at the module level as :func:fs.copy. That way, you don't have to instantiate one or more objects simply for the purpose of a single operation.

Factory Functions

Most of the classes have a corresponding factory function (usually with
the same name in lower case) which tries to be more accepting in what
its parameters are and to convert them to what's needed by the class's
own ``__init__`` method. So, for example, the :class:`Principal` class whose
initialiser expects a PySID structure has a corresponding :func:`principal`
function which will take a Sid or a user or group name or None or an existing
:class:`Principal` object.

Dump

Each object derived from :class:core._WinSysObject has a dump method which is intended to display its internal structures, possibly recursively where some of the structures are themselves WinSys objects. This is intended more for ad-hoc use in the interpreter where it's convenient to see, eg, the security structure which has been loaded from a file.

Iterators & Generators

Where possible and meaningful, lazy iterators have been used, often
implemented by generators. This started in the :mod:`fs` module where
thousands of files were being queried for information, but the approach
has generally been adopted across the package.

Context Managers

Where it makes sense, context managers have been used, either by means of the contextlib contextmanager decorator or by defining an object as its own context manager by means of __enter__ and __exit__ methods. Examples of context-managed objects include the :class:ipc.Mailslot and :class:security.Security objects. Examples of decorated functions include the :func:security.change_privileges and :func:security.impersonate functions.

ToDo

Obviously, there's loads to do. The Windows API is vast; even the amount of it exposed by pywin32 far exceeds my immediate needs and the time at my disposal. The implementation of this package has been driven largely by the very specific needs of our Windows sysadmins in their day-to-day work. My intention is to carry on wrapping Windows functionality in a similar way, but if anyone has particular needs, or can provide functionality to add in, let's hear about it.