[Python-Dev] PEP 383: Non-decodable Bytes in System Character Interfaces (original) (raw)

Aahz aahz at pythoncraft.com
Fri Apr 24 17:27:46 CEST 2009

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009, Paul Moore wrote:

2009/4/24 Simon Cross <hodgestar+pythondev at gmail.com>:

Humour aside :), the expectation that filenames are Unicode data simply doesn't agree with the reality of POSIX file systems. However, it does agree with the reality of Windows file systems. The fundamental problem here is that there is a strong OS disparity - for Windows, the OS uses Unicode, for POSIX, the OS uses bytes. Traditionally, Python has been happy to expose OS differences, and let application code address platform portability issues. But this is such a fundamental area, that doing so is problematic - it could easily result in more code being OS-specific (in subtle, only-affects-non-Latin-alphabet-using-users manners) rather than less.

The part that I haven't seen clearly addressed so far is what happens when disks get mounted across OSes (e.g. NFS).

While I agree that there should be a layer on top that can handle "most" situations, it also seems clear that the raw layer needs to be readily accessible.

Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/

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