What's with the APISite.encodings() magic? - pywikibot

11 Dec 2022

      I've been beating my head against the wall trying to figure out how to build a Mock of APISite.  If I do the obvious:
site = mocker.MagicMock(spec=APISite)
I end up with:
...
AttributeError: Mock object has no attribute 'encodings'
Yet, if I hand-build a Site object, sure enough it does:
...
...
...
import pywikibot
site = pywikibot.Site("en", "wikipedia")
site.encodings()
('utf-8', 'iso-8859-1')
...
...
...
To make a long story short, eventually I found this bit of magic in _basesite.py:
...
def __getattr__(self, attr):
    """Delegate undefined methods calls to the Family object."""
    if hasattr(self.__class__, attr):
        return getattr(self.__class__, attr)
    try:
        method = getattr(self.family, attr)
        if not callable(method):
            raise AttributeError
        f = functools.partial(method, self.code)
        if hasattr(method, '__doc__'):
            f.__doc__ = method.__doc__
        return f
    except AttributeError:
        raise AttributeError("{} instance has no attribute '{}'"
                             .format(self.__class__.__name__, attr))

WTF?  I mean, I see what it's doing, but why go to this level of obfuscation?  It's basically reimplementing class inheritance manually (and in a way which is totally beyond the ability of Mock to understand).