[Python-Dev] Remaining decisions on PEP 471 -- os.scandir() (original) (raw)

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at gmail.com
Mon Jul 21 17:57:12 CEST 2014

Hi,

2014-07-20 18:50 GMT+02:00 Antoine Pitrou <antoine at python.org>:

Have you tried modifying importlib's bootstrap.py to use scandir() instead of listdir() + stat()?

IMO the current os.scandir() API does not fit importlib requirements. importlib usually wants fresh data, whereas DirEntry cache cannot be invalidated. It's probably possible to cache some os.stat() result in importlib, but it looks like it requires a non trivial refactoring of the code. I don't know importlib enough to suggest how to change it.

There are many open isssues related to stat() in importlib, I found these ones:

http://bugs.python.org/issue14604 http://bugs.python.org/issue14067 http://bugs.python.org/issue19216

Closed issues:

http://bugs.python.org/issue17330 http://bugs.python.org/issue18810

By the way, DirEntry constructor is not documented in the PEP. Should we document it? It might be a way to "invalidate the cache":

entry = DirEntry(os.path.dirname(entry.path), entry.name)

Maybe it is an abuse of the API. A clear_cache() method would be less ugly :-) But maybe Ben Hoyt does not want to promote keeping DirEntry for a long time?

Another question: should we expose DirEntry type directly in the os namespace? (os.DirEntry)

Victor

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