[Python-Dev] Bytes path support (original) (raw)

Tres Seaver tseaver at palladion.com
Tue Aug 19 19:56:16 CEST 2014

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On 08/19/2014 01:43 PM, Ben Hoyt wrote:

The official policy is that we want them [support for bytes paths in stdlib functions] to go away, but reality so far has not budged. We will continue to hold our breath though. :-)

Does that mean that new APIs should explicitly not support bytes? I'm thinking of os.scandir() (PEP 471), which I'm implementing at the moment. I was originally going to make it support bytes so it was compatible with listdir, but maybe that's a bad idea. Bytes paths are essentially broken on Windows. Bytes paths are "essential" on Unix, though, so I don't think we should create new low-level APIs that don't support bytes. Fair enough. I don't quite understand, though -- why is the "official policy" to kill something that's "essential" on *nix?

ISTM that the policy is based on a fantasy that "it looks like text to me in my use cases, so therefore it must be text for everyone."

Tres. - --

Tres Seaver +1 540-429-0999 tseaver at palladion.com Palladion Software "Excellence by Design" http://palladion.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)

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