[Python-Dev] Windows: Remove support of bytes filenames in theos module? (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Feb 10 09:50:21 EST 2016

Andrew Barnert via Python-Dev writes:

That doesn't mean the problem can't be solved. Apple solved their equivalent problem, albeit by sacrificing backward compatibility in a way Microsoft can't get away with. I haven't seen a MacRoman or Shift-JIS filename since they broke the last holdout

If you lived where I do, you'd still be seeing both, because you wouldn't be able to escape archival files on CD and removable media (typically written on Windows boxen). They still work, sort of == same as always, and as far as I know, that's because Apple has not sacrificed backward compatibility: under the hood, Darwin is still a POSIX kernel which thinks of file names and everything else outside of memory as bytestreams.

One place they fail very badly is Shift JIS filenames in zipfiles, which nothing provided by Apple can deal with safely, and InfoZip breaks too (at least in MacPorts). Yes, I know that is specifically disallowed. Feel free to tell 1_0000_0000 Japanese Windows users. Thank heaven for Python there! A three-line hack and I'm free!

So Python 2 works great on Macs, whether you use bytes or unicode. But that doesn't help us on Windows, where you can't use bytes, or Linux, where you can't use Unicode (without surrogate escape or some other mechanism that Python 2 doesn't have).

You contradict yourself! ;-)

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