[Python-Dev] pathlib - current status of discussions (original) (raw)

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Tue Apr 12 11:25:15 EDT 2016

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 7:58 AM, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:

Sticking points: ---------------

Do we allow bytes to be returned from os.fspath()? If yes, then do we allow bytes from fspath()?

I would say No and No, on the basis that it's far easier to widen their scope in 3.7 than to narrow it. Once you declare that one or both of these may return bytes, it becomes an annoying incompatibility to change that (even if it is marked provisional), which almost certainly means it won't happen. By restricting them both, we force the issue: if you want bytes, you'll know about it.

I'd also prefer to stick to Unicode path names, for reasons I've stated in other threads. Undecodable path byte streams can be handled already, so what are we really gaining by allowing a Path-like object to emit bytes? If it becomes a major issue for a lot of types, it wouldn't be hard to add a helper function somewhere (or a mixin class that provides a ready-to-go fspath, which might well be sufficient).

ChrisA

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