[Python-Dev] file system path protocol PEP (original) (raw)

Sven R. Kunze srkunze at mail.de
Thu May 12 12:13:08 EDT 2016

On 11.05.2016 23:57, Brett Cannon wrote:

On Wed, 11 May 2016 at 14:29 Nikolaus Rath <Nikolaus at rath.org_ _<mailto:Nikolaus at rath.org>> wrote:

On May 11 2016, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org_ _<mailto:brett at python.org>> wrote: > This PEP proposes a protocol for classes which represent a file system > path to be able to provide a str or bytes representation. [...] As I said before, to me this seems like a lot of effort for a very specific use-case.

Exactly. Especially when considering what else can be done to improve the situation considerably.

So let me put forward two hypothetical scenarios to better understand your position:

- A new module for URL handling is added to the standard library (or urllib is suitably extended). There is a proposal to add a new protocol that allows classes to provide a str or bytes representation of URLs. - A new (third-party) library for natural language processing arises that exposes a specific class for representing audio data. Existing language processing code just uses bytes objects. To ease transition and interoperability, it is proposed to add a new protocol for classes that represend audio data to provide a bytes representation.

You can even add the timedelta-to-seconds protocol that somebody thought would be good idea:

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2016-April/144018.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2016-May/040226.html

The generalization is straight-forward and a result of this discussion. If it works and is a good idea for pathlib, then there's absolutely no reason not to do this for the datetime lib and other rich-object libs. Same goes the other way round. Question still is: is it a good idea?

Maybe, it will become a successful pattern. Maybe not.

Do you think you would you be in favor of adding these protocols to the stdlib/languange reference as well?

Maybe for URLs, not for audio data (at least not in the stdlib; community can do what they want). If not, what's the crucial difference to file system paths? Nearly everyone uses file system paths on a regular basis, less so than URLs but still a good amount of people. Very few people work with audio data.

Amount of usage should be taken into account of course. However, question remains if that suffices as a justification for the effort.

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