Making third-party extensions a bit easier

[LecrisUT]

I am researching how we can expand the field with more metadata on our project. The documentation was very helpful for getting started, but I've hit a few places where there is a bit of friction

Adding field decorators requires extending attr._make._CountingAttr

This is way more complicated then it seems at first glance because:

• the _CountingAttr keeps an internal counter for the ordering
• changing the return type of field makes it be picked up as a custom default instead of an extension of _CountingAttr

The initial design I considered was

def field(*, metadata=None, **kwargs: Any) -> Any:
    if not metadata:
        metadata = {}
    metadata.setdefault("my_ext", MyMetadata())
    return MyCountingAttr(attrs.field(**kwargs, metadata=metadata))

class MyCountingAttr(attr._make._CountingAttr):
    def __init__(self, ca):
        for f in ca.__slots__:
            setattr(self, f, getattr(ca, f))
        attr._make._CountingAttr.cls_counter -= 1
        self.counter -= 1

    def new_decorator(self, meth):
        my_metadata: TmtAttrsMetadata = self.metadata["my_ext"]
        my_metadata.func = meth
        return meth

@attrs.define
class MyMetadata:
    func: Callable[..., Any] | None = None

@attrs.define
class Example:
    x: field()

    @x.new_decorator
    def _x_my_func(self):
        pass

but this fails when it gets to

attrs/src/attr/_make.py

Lines 403 to 407 in f0e420b

	ca_names = {
	name
	for name, attr in cd.items()
	if attr.__class__ is _CountingAttr
	}

Could not find a way around it besides changing that to a issubclass check

Many useful internal functions are not exposed

For example attr._make._determine_whether_to_implement would be really nice to not have to re-implement, especially when it comes to the correct handling of classmethod. Admittedly my usage there is quite weird (injecting some methods/classmethods based on inputs to the @define decorator) and it could be better handled with inheritance/metaclass, but it's the first example of the internal helpers that I've found in my code.

[LecrisUT]

Quite related, afaiu _CountingAttr is the reason we must use field to allow for decorator approaches. But with Annotated also becoming a thing, would there be a way to move this logic. I don't know if it's a limitation in the python parser that would not be able to resolve where to get the decorator from. Probably there is already research on this in an issue?