[Python-Dev] File system path encoding on Windows (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull turnbull.stephen.fw at u.tsukuba.ac.jp
Sun Aug 28 23:43:47 EDT 2016

tritium-list at sdamon.com writes:

Once you get to var lengths like that, arcane single character flags start looking preferable. How about "PYTHONWINLEGACY" to just turn it all on or off. If the code breaks on one thing, it obviously isn't written to use the other two, so might as well shut them all off.

Since Steve is thinking about three separate PEPs (among other things, they might be implemented on different timelines), that's not really possible (placing the features under control of one switch at different times would be an unacceptable compatibility break).

Anyway, it's not obvious that your premise is true, because code isn't written to do any of those things. It's written to process bytes agnostically. The question is what does the environment look like. Steve obviously has a perspective on environment which suggests that these aspects are often decoupled because in Windows the actual filesystem is never bytes-oriented. I don't know if it's possible to construct a coherent environment where these aspects are decoupled, but I can't say it's impossible, either.

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