[Python-Dev] pathlib and issue 11406 (a directory iterator returning stat-like info) (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Nov 25 09:33:01 CET 2013

On 25 Nov 2013 13:18, "Ben Hoyt" <benhoyt at gmail.com> wrote:

> The idea of the rich stat result object is that has all that info > prepopulated, based on an initial stat call. "Caching" it amounts to "keep a > reference to it". > > It is suggested that it would be a subset of the pathlib.Path API: > http://bugs.python.org/issue19725 > > If it's also a superset of the existing stat object API, then at least > Path.stat and Path.lstat (and perhaps the lower level APIs) can be updated > to return it in 3.5. Got it. >> "Worst case", we can add os.scandir() separately, which return >> DirEntry, "path-like" objects. > > Indeed, we may still want such an object API, since dirent doesn't provide > full stat info. I'm not quite sure what you're suggesting here. In any case, I'm going to modify my scandir() so its DirEntry objects are closer to pathlib.Path, particularly: * isdir() -> isdir() * isfile() -> isfile() * islink() -> issymlink() * add issocket(), isfifo(), isblockdevice(), and ischardevice() I'm considering removing DirEntry's .dirent attribute entirely. The above is* functions cover everything in .dirent.dtype in a much more Pythonic and cross-platform way, and the only other info in .dirent is dino -- can a non-Windows dev tell me how or when dino would be useful? If it's useful, is it useful in a higher-level, cross-platform API such as scandir()? Hmmm, I wonder about this "rich stat object" idea in light of the above. Do the methods on pathlib.Path basically supercede the need for this? Because otherwise folks will always be wondering whether to say "path.isdir()" or "path.stat().isdir" ... two ways to do it, right next to each other. So I'd prefer to add the "rich" stuff on the higher-level Path instead of the lower-level stat.

The rich stat API proposal exists precisely to provide a clean way to do stat result caching - path objects always give immediate data, stat objects give cached answers.

The direct APIs on Path would just become a trivial shortcut once a rich stat APIs existed - you could use the long form if you wanted to, but it would be pointless to do so.

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