[Python-Dev] Path PEP: some comments (original) (raw)

Giovanni Bajo rasky at develer.com
Sun Feb 5 15:17:42 CET 2006

On Sun, February 5, 2006 13:57, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

I think the path module should provide these under a different name: creationtime and statuschangetime. Either of these might be absent.

+1. This is exactly what I proposed, in fact.

ctime should be provided to report whatever ctime used to report in the past (i.e. creationtime on Windows, statuschangetime on Unix).

As I stated in my mail, I don't agree that there needs to be such a strict compatibility between methods in the new Path class and functions in the old os.path (or other) modules. Some consistency will ease the transition of course, but there is absolutely no need to provide a 1:1 mapping. Old code will continue to work, and new code might adapt to a new (possibly) better API. Given the confusion with 'ctime', I don't think that providing it in the new Path class would be a good move. It's better to force people to explicitally name what they're asking for (either creation_time or status_change_time).

In other words, if there are mistakes in the old API, this is the time to fix them. Why should we carry them over to a new API?

Giovanni Bajo

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