Make `get_or_create`'s arguments keyword-only

[mscheper]

Code of Conduct

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Feature Description

To save developer confusion, change the arguments for get_or_create, like this:

def get_or_create(self, *, defaults=None, **kwargs)

Although this would technically create backward-compatibility issues, I would argue that, in practice, these would be very rare and easily fixed.

Alternatively, deprecate this function and create a new one, perhaps create_or_get, that works this way.

Problem

When I unwittingly neglected to unpack a dict as arguments for get_or_create, the result was a MultipleObjectsReturned exception. While this was clearly a mistake (which I made at 1am today), the exception was misleading. It set me off on a wild goose chase, trying to work out how multiple objects matching the arguments could possibly exist.

The reason was that defaults is a positional argument. This swallowed the dict I passed, and caused a zero-argument call to get, which raised the exception.

The dict was actually locals(), which I used to pass the arguments for a service module function to a one-liner get_or_create—I just forgot to put ** in front of it. It's not the first time I've passed function arguments on that way (DRY and all that), and it's certainly not an unheard-of technique in Python.

OTOH, in a lot of Django code, and indeed the Django docs, I've only ever seen defaults passed by keyword, after criteria arguments. And while a zero-argument get() make sense for single-row tables, it's hard to imagine any developer positionally passing defaults to get_or_create.

Request or proposal

proposal

Additional Details

While not strictly backwards compatible, I believe the developer confusion saved would greatly outweigh the minor and unlikely hassle that one or two devs may experience from this change. As I said, it's hard to imagine it actually breaking any existing code, and even if it did, it would cause an easy-to-fix NameError or TypeError: just type 'defaults=' . But it would likely save developers getting confused by MultipleObjectsReturned for the same reason I was.

Implementation Suggestions

Just add the three characters to the function definition. Alternatively, deprecate get_or_create, and create a different method, as in the feature description.

[github-actions]

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