It seems that `enum.Enum.__init__` serves no purpose

[tungol]

Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

Enum gained an __init__ method in 3.11 which just passes:

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwds):
        pass

That was added in #30582. One person questioned it at the time, but there was no response. The best I can figure is that it was related to special handling of __init__ in EnumType.__dir__, which you can see here:

cpython/Lib/enum.py

Lines 768 to 779 in 3852269

	def __dir__(cls):
	# TODO: check for custom __init__, __new__, __format__, __repr__, __str__, __init_subclass__
	# on object-based enums
	if cls._member_type_ is object:
	interesting = set(cls._member_names_)
	if cls._new_member_ is not object.__new__:
	interesting.add('__new__')
	if cls.__init_subclass__ is not object.__init_subclass__:
	interesting.add('__init_subclass__')
	for method in ('__init__', '__format__', '__repr__', '__str__'):
	if getattr(cls, method) not in (getattr(Enum, method), getattr(Flag, method)):
	interesting.add(method)

That special handling of __init__ was removed by #30677 prior to 3.11 being released, which leaves no plausible function to Enum.__init__ that I can see. It muddies introspection of the type, so I think we should remove it if that's really the case.

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

Linked PRs

• gh-128080: remove unnecessary __init__ method from Enum #128081