[Python-Dev] Python-3.0, unicode, and os.environ (original) (raw)

Scott Dial scott+python-dev at scottdial.com
Mon Dec 8 20:39:13 CET 2008

Guido van Rossum wrote:

On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 10:34 AM, <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:

On Mon, 8 Dec 2008 at 13:16, Terry Reedy wrote:

And the decoding problems don't pass silently either - they just get emitted as a warning by default instead of causing the application to crash. Do they get automatically logged? In any case, the errors parameter has an in between option to neither ignore or raise but to replace and give something printable. I just really really don't want the default to be "ignore". Defaulting to a warning is fine with me, as would be defaulting to a traceback. Do you really not care about the risk where apps that weren't written to be prepared to handle this will be rendered completely useless if a single file in a directory has an unencodable name?

Since when do warnings cause apps to be rendered completely useless? I think it's easy to agree that defaulting to an exception is not good for the reason you give, but I don't see how that applies to a warning. And, it seems like a warning covers the issues that the other people want as well. If there is a warning, then there is at least a record of the fact that some filenames were ignored. Presumably if I was responsible for the correctness of some piece of code, I would see the warning in a log of some sort and could investigate it further (if I cared), otherwise I could choose to ignore it. I don't see os.listdir(name) to be one of those situations that emitting a warning is a nuisance at all.

-Scott

-- Scott Dial scott at scottdial.com scodial at cs.indiana.edu

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