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

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Tue Dec 9 21:25:01 CET 2008

James Y Knight wrote:

On Dec 9, 2008, at 6:04 AM, Anders J. Munch wrote:

The typical application will just obliviously use os.listdir(dir) and get the default elide-and-warn behaviour for un-decodable names. That rare special application I guess this is a new definition of rare special application: "an application which deals with user-specified files". This is the problem I see in having two parallel APIs: people keep saying "most applications can just go ahead and use the [broken] unicode string API". If there was a unicode API and a bytes API, but everyone was clear that "always use the bytes API" is the right thing to do, that'd be okay... But, since even python-dev members are saying that only a rare special app needs to care about working with users' existing files, I'm rather worried this API design will cause most programs written in python to be broken. Which seems a shame. I agree with you which was part of why I raised this subject but I also think that using the warnings module to issue a warning and ignore the entire problematic entry is a reasonable compromise. Hopefully it will become obvious to people that it's a python3 wart at some point in the future and we'll re-examine the default. But until then, having a printed warning that individual apps can turn into an exception seems like it is less broken than the other alternatives the "rare special application" people can live with :-)

-Toshio

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