[Python-Dev] Deprecate codecs.open() and StreamWriter/StreamReader (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Tue May 24 18:35:16 CEST 2011

On 5/24/2011 6:14 AM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

I have no idea why TextIOWrapper was added to the stdlib instead of making StreamReaderWriter more capable, since StreamReaderWriter had already been available in Python since Python 1.6 (and this is being used by codecs.open()).

As I understand it, you (and others) wrote codecs long ago and recently other people wrote the new i/o stack, which sometimes uses codecs, and when they needed to add a few details, they 'naturally' added them to the module they were working on and understood (and planned to rewrite in C) rather than to the older module that they maybe did not completely understand and which is only in Python.

The Victor comes along to do maintenance on some of the Asian codecs and discovers that he needs to make changes in two (or more?) places rather than one, which he naturally finds unsatifactory.

Perhaps we should deprecate TextIOWrapper instead and replace it with codecs.StreamReaderWriter ? ;-)

I think we should separate two issues: removing internal implementation duplication and removing external api duplication. I should think that the former should not be too controversial. The latter, I know, is more contentious. One problem is that stdlib changes that perhaps 'should' have been made in 3.0/1 could not be discovered until the moratorium and greater focus on the stdlib.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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