Format field comments as real docstrings

[michaelosthege]

This line https://github.com/danielgtaylor/python-betterproto/blob/master/src/betterproto/templates/template.py.j2#L49 formats the comments on class attributes like this.

With the example from the readme:

// This is the class docstring
message EchoRequest {
    string value = 1;
    // This is a field docstring
    uint32 extra_times = 2;
}

It generates this Python code:

@dataclass
class EchoRequest(betterproto.Message):
    """This is the class docstring"""

    value: str = betterproto.string_field(1)
    # This is a field docstring
    extra_times: int = betterproto.uint32_field(2)

But a slightly different formatting would make it a docstring recognized by IDEs:

class EchoRequest(betterproto.Message):
    """This is the class docstring"""

    value: str = betterproto.string_field(1)
    extra_times: int = betterproto.uint32_field(2)
    """This is a field docstring"""

Would you mind changing the formatting here? Or are there specific reasons why it produces the current output format?

[Gobot1234]

This seems to me like a good change. Would you be willing to PR it?

[michaelosthege]

I'm trying, but are blocked by unfamiliarity with the projects structure and tooling. I have no poetry installed and no experience with its workflow..

• How can I install betterproto it in develop mode? pip install -e . There's no setup.py in the project and I have never seen something like that.
• I tried to run the tests, but since I couldn't get it installed, also pytest -v from the root dir didn't work..
• Looks like the formatting of field.comment must be changed, but I couldn't find where that's defined.

Also it looks like some classes in the codebase are autogenerated and would be reformatted by the change.

[Gobot1234]

You should install poetry pip install poetry using pip is a pain, then to install you just do poetry install
To run the tests you need to do poe full-test.
field.comment is currently defined here, https://github.com/danielgtaylor/python-betterproto/blob/master/src/betterproto/plugin/models.py#L195-L202, you'd need to edit this line here

python-betterproto/src/betterproto/plugin/models.py

Line 152 in 671c0ff

return f"{pad}# " + f"\n{pad}# ".join(lines)