[Python-Dev] Backward compatibility of shutil.rmtree (original) (raw)

martin at v.loewis.de martin at v.loewis.de
Sun May 20 23:46:22 CEST 2012

Zitat von Hynek Schlawack <hs at ox.cx>:

Two of them differ in the new version: os.fwalk() is used instead of os.listdir() and os.unlinkat() instead of os.remove(). It would be os.flistdir instead of os.listdir, not os.fwalk, right? It’s actually os.fwalk. It has been implemented by Charles-François as a dependency of the ticket because it seemed generally useful – therefore I used it for the implementation.

I think that's a mistake then, because of the limited error reporting. With os.fwalk, you don't know exactly what it is that failed, but it may be useful to know.

So I propose to duplicate the walking in rmtree.

I also wonder how exactly in your implementation directory handles get closed, and how that correlates to attempts at removing the directories.

(There has been also been the idea to re-implement the default rmdir with os.walk to make them more similar; but that's a different story.)

-1 on that, for the reasons above.

So you suggest to not mention all the possible functions at all? That seems useful to me, as the list will (hopefully) grow anyway and nailing it down is getting less useful with every new implementation.

Exactly. Users would have to look at the code, but that will make them aware that the code may change. For that reason, also, using fwalk is a bad idea, since they then will need to trace their code reading into fwalk.

Regards, Martin

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