New submission from Glenn Linderman <v+pyt...@g.nevcal.com>:

My first time to use winreg and I am sure that some of this report is 
documentation, but depending on behavior in other versions, maybe it is a 
regression in code as well, but I doubt it.

I'm reading the 3.3 documentation, but using 3.2.3 for testing.  The 
documentation doesn't indicate any change execpt the exception thrown, between 
3.2 and 3.3.

The documentation for OpenKey indicates it has 4 parameters, calling the 3rd 
"reserverd" and the 4th "access".  These are given default values of 0 and 
KEY_ALL_ACCESS, respectively, according to the function definition.

The text of the documentation does not further explain these parameters, rather 
it explains "res" and "sam" which may appear to correspond... (that is problem 
#1)

Assuming a correspondence, and a name change for those parameters somewhere 
along the line (perhaps between 3.1 and 3.2 when named parameters became 
supported, per the doc. note), then "sam" is defined to have a default value of 
"KEY_READ".  That conflicts with the default value shown in the function 
definition (this is problem #2).

The behavior of OpenKey in 3.2.2 seems to be that the access parameter actually 
defaults to "KEY_READ", rather than "KEY_ALL_ACCESS".  Since the documentation 
is inconsistent in this area, I'm not sure if there was intended to be a code 
change, nor what the prior behavior might have been, nor what the future 
behavior is intended to be.  If a change in default was intended, either it was 
implemented wrong, or documented wrong, and there is no indication in the 
documentation that a change was made, or should have been made (this is problem 
#3).

I suspect the changes should all be to the documentation, changing the function 
definition to read "KEY_READ" instead of "KEY_ALL_ACCESS", and changing the 
parameters in the text to be called "reserved" and "access" instead of "res" 
and "sam", and if so, then problem #3 is fictitious, just a result of the other 
inconsistencies, and speculation.

----------
assignee: docs@python
components: Documentation
messages: 161822
nosy: docs@python, v+python
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: winreg OpenKey doesn't work as documented
type: behavior
versions: Python 3.2, Python 3.3

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Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue14943>
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