[Python-Dev] os.path.normcase rationale? (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Fri Sep 24 16:53:56 CEST 2010

On 24 September 2010 15:29, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

I don't think we should try to reimplement what the filesystem does. I think we should just ask the filesystem (how exactly I haven't figured out yet but I expect it will be more OS-specific than filesystem-specific). It will have to be a new API -- normcase() at least is intended to return a case-flattened name on OSes where case-preserving filesystems are the default, and changing it to look at the filesystem would break too much code. For a new use case we need a new API.

I dug into this once, and as far as I could tell, it's possible to get the information on Windows, but there's no way on Linux to "ask the filesystem". From my researches, the standard interfaces a filesystem has to implement on Linux don't offer any means of asking this question.

Of course, (a) I'm no Linux expert so what do I know, and (b) it may well be possible to come up with a "good enough" solution by ignoring pathologically annoying theoretical cases.

I'm happy to provide Windows code if someone needs it. Paul

PS There were some places I'd have been glad of this feature (and from what I recall, Mercurial could have used it too) so I'm +1 on the idea.

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