Older stubs still explicitly using `Any` rather than `Incomplete`

[Avasam]

Thanks to typeshed-stats (#9386), I was able to make the following list of stubs majorly using Any, indicating that they've likely not been switched over to Incomplete yet.
Ordered by ratio of "explicit Any / explicit Incomplete + 1" parameters and variables.
Excludes stubs marked as obsolete and ratio <= 1 rounded down.

Package Name	Explicit Any	Explicit Incomplete	Ratio
WebOb	119	0	119
WTForms	114	0	114
simplejson	59	0	59
python-gflags	50	0	50
regex	41	0	41
pyflakes	40	0	40
Markdown	33	0	33
jmespath	60	1	30
toml	30	0	30
decorator	28	0	28
python-xlib	28	0	28
uWSGI	21	0	21
gevent	114	5	19
polib	18	0	18
slumber	16	0	16
six	15	0	15
PyYAML	216	14	14
pynput	14	0	14
stdlib	3295	237	13
opentracing	25	1	12
hdbcli	24	1	12
python-jose	56	4	11
fanstatic	11	0	11
Flask-Cors	10	0	10
mypy-extensions	10	0	10
protobuf	144	15	9
parsimonious	27	2	9
capturer	9	0	9
croniter	9	0	9
greenlet	8	0	8
singledispatch	8	0	8
translationstring	8	0	8
xmltodict	8	0	8
html5lib	179	24	7
paramiko	45	6	6
console-menu	11	1	5
waitress	5	0	5
python-crontab	18	3	4
cachetools	4	0	4
colorama	4	0	4
qrbill	4	0	4
Pygments	178	47	3
vobject	93	24	3
PyMySQL	88	28	3
dateparser	86	21	3
Send2Trash	3	0	3
untangle	3	0	3
usersettings	3	0	3
seaborn	186	65	2
mock	137	45	2
psycopg2	97	37	2
beautifulsoup4	72	33	2
aws-xray-sdk	61	21	2
humanfriendly	54	22	2
requests	53	19	2
JACK-Client	2	0	2
chevron	2	0	2
first	2	0	2
ibm-db	2	0	2
libsass	2	0	2
retry	2	0	2
tabulate	2	0	2
toposort	2	0	2
gdb	2	0	2

(updated as of 2023-11-02)

---

We can also list 3rd party stubs by how many module-level and class-level variables they have:
for d in stubs/*/; do echo "$d,$( grep -ERoi '(^| )[[:alnum:]]+?: Any$' $d | wc -l )"; done

Package Name	Var Any count
html5lib	144
ldap3	133
Pygments	131
psutil	82
PyYAML	77
google-cloud-ndb	55
PyMySQL	35
psycopg2	33
httplib2	32
beautifulsoup4	27
protobuf	27
aws-xray-sdk	25
passlib	24
oauthlib	23
mock	16
dateparser	16
fpdf2	12
python-jose	9
paramiko	9
requests	6
geopandas	5
watchpoints	3
boltons	2
Markdown	2

(updated as of 2025-04-19)

[Avasam]

Do you think it's fine doing a single PR for those (single search & replace change across many third party stubs) instead of 40-70 PRs?

Still gotta validate that those with few Any actually meant it. Bigger ones can probably be mostly blindly changed?

[AlexWaygood]

Do you think it's fine doing a single PR for those (single search & replace change across many third party stubs) instead of 40-70 PRs?

Maybe we could start off doing a grep for (or using a script to auto-update) function signatures with foo: Any | None = .... We can be pretty confident that those are artefacts of stubgen, so we can probably update all of those to foo: Incomplete | None = ... in a bulk PR pretty safely.

[srittau]

I'd say fairly safe, with only few false positives, are:

• Function arguments that contain a union with Any. (But not return types.)
• Fields that contain Any, either standalone or as union.

It's also not a complete disaster if a wrong Any gets changed to Incomplete, it just means it needs to be rechecked at some point.

[Avasam]

Similar to : Any | None = ..., : Any | None\n seems like an equivalent stubgen artefact for class variables.

[AlexWaygood]

• Fields that contain Any, either standalone or as union.

: Any | None\n seems very safe to do a search-and-replace for. For : Any\n, I feel a little queasy. But I'd feel more confident if we only replaced places which had, say, three Any attributes in a row, e.g.

class Foo:
    a: Any
    b: Any
    c: Any

We could find those using regexes or AST.

[Avasam]

Function arguments that contain a union with Any. (But not return types.)

Seems fine to me after running those we deem "safer".

Fields that contain Any, either standalone [...]

+1 What Alex said.

---

After : Any | None = ... and : Any | None\n there's 15 Any | None left. And except for mock they do mostly look like they could be Incomplete | None.

• 4 in mock
• 1 in pyOpenSSL
• 1 in redis
• 8 in SQLAlchemy

---

After a series of "autofixes". I can update the table above to see if there's still any obvious ones.

[JelleZijlstra]

It might actually be fine to change every Any in old stubs to Incomplete. In theory, we'll go over the Incompletes later and change them back to Any if appropriate.

[srittau]

The only thing I'm a bit uneasy about is changing Any | None return types, because they are fairly common workarounds for the missing permissive union type, and they are not that easy to spot.

[Avasam]

@srittau
I agree with return types. I didn't include them in my table above for similar reasons.

TypeAliases should probably also be left untouched if I"m to guess.

[AlexWaygood]

Similar to : Any | None = ..., : Any | None\n seems like an equivalent stubgen artefact for class variables.

Fancy taking this on as "stage 2", @Avasam? (Regardless of how far we want to go, I think I'd prefer to keep doing this in stages, so we can evaluate the risk level for each stage independently.)

[Avasam]

so we can evaluate the risk level for each stage independently

plus we may learn things so the same can be done for stdlib