Potentially problematic config parameter extraction

[Ian0sborne]

The proc function in packs/proc/proc.py calls the process_bin_WD2 function, passing in two arguments from the config file: file_path & save_path. The way these two arguments are extracted from the config file (shown below) could be problematic if the config file passed in also contains optional/additional parameters in future.

conf_dict = read_config_file(full_path)
# removing the first two components so that they can be fed into functions
arg_dict  = dict(list(conf_dict.items())[2:])
# check the method implemented, currently just process
match conf_dict['process']:
    case 'decode':
        if conf_dict['wavedump_edition'] == 2:
            process_bin_WD2(**arg_dict)

I suggest we extract the required parameters by their key, making the code safer and robust in case of future changes.

[jwaiton]

The use of **arg_dict which extracts keyword arguments does this for you. So the input to the function is actually:

process_bin_WD2(file_path = ..., output_path = ..., etc)

Any additional parameters that are included in the config but not in the inputs of process_bin_WD2() will crash the code as expected. If you extract the config parameters explicitly as you suggest, the user may end up having a bunch of nonsense parameters in their config that don't do anything, making the configs more confusing. It should be explicit when you're missing a parameter and when a parameter isn't needed.

[Ian0sborne]

This makes sense, however if the config file changes in future, this will cause issues. As suggested by John, using pop to get rid of the unwanted arguments (instead of extracting the wanted arguments with [2:0]) would be a cleaner method and more future-proof.