Inheritance best practice : *args, **kwargs or explicitly specifying parameters

Question

I often find myself overwriting methods of a parent class, and can never decide if I should explicitly list given parameters or just use a blanket *args, **kwargs

Answer 1

Not really an answer but more a side note: If you really, really want to make sure the default values for the parent class are propagated to the child classes you can do something like:

class Parent(object):

    default_save_commit=True
    def save(self, commit=default_save_commit):
        # ...

class Derived(Parent):

    def save(self, commit=Parent.default_save_commit):
        super(Derived, self).save(commit=commit)

However I have to admit this looks quite ugly and I would only use it if I feel I really need it.