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