Chris Barker added the comment: Yes Please! I'd offer to help, but I really don't get the intricacies involved. I will offer to proofread and copy-edit though, if that's helpful. And I note that coincidentally, just in the last week, I needed to make an absolute path from a Path, and it took me far too long to figure out that .resolve() would do it for me. Then I needed to do it again three days later, and it again took a while -- "resolve" is simply not mnemonic for me, and I'm guessing a lot of people have the same issue. And I didn't find .absolute(), cause it's not documented. I see in issue #29688 that there are reasons for that, but I'll make a plea: Please document .absolute(), even if those docs say something like "may not work in all circumstances, not well tested". Alternatively, if it's decided that folks should just use .resolve() in all cases anyway, then make .absolute() an alias for .resolve(). Or if that's not a good option, then at least put some prominent notes in resolve() so people will find it. Also -- I needed to read the resolve() docs carefully (and then test) to see if it was what I wanted - which I know, is what this issue is about. In short -- I understand that this is a complex issue, but making an absolute path is a pretty common use case, and we've had os.path.abspath() for decades, so there should be one obvious way to do it, and it should be easily discoverable. NOTE: even if there is no one to do the work of properly testing .absolute() at this point, it would b nice to at least decide now what the long term goal is -- will there be an absolute() or is resolve() all we really need? ---------- nosy: +ChrisBarker _______________________________________ Python tracker https://bugs.python.org/issue39090 _______________________________________

Paul Moore added the comment:

In short -- I understand that this is a complex issue, but making an absolute path is a pretty common use case, and we've had os.path.abspath() for decades, so there should be one obvious way to do it, and it should be easily discoverable.

+1 on this. Given that (as far as I can tell from the various discussions) `resolve` works fine as long as the file exists, maybe the key distinction to make is whether you have an existing file or not. (More subtle questions like UNC path vs drive letter, mentioned on the Discourse thread, are probably things that we can defer to a "more advanced cases" discussion in the docs). ---------- nosy: +paul.moore _______________________________________ Python tracker https://bugs.python.org/issue39090 _______________________________________

Paul Moore added the comment: You've provided links to your branches, but not to the specific text you're proposing to add. Can you link to a diff or something that shows what you've added more precisely? ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker https://bugs.python.org/issue39090 _______________________________________

Vedran Čačić added the comment: If we want something mnemonic, I'm sure nothing beats __abs__. (Hey, we have __truediv__ already!;) ---------- nosy: +veky _______________________________________ Python tracker https://bugs.python.org/issue39090 _______________________________________

Floris Lambrechts added the comment: (sorry, didn't see the GitHub comments before... I'll process those first.) ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker https://bugs.python.org/issue39090 _______________________________________

Not mentioning Path.resolve()'s behavior w.r.t. non-existing files since

John Hennig added the comment: @Floris: that's documented in resolve() itself. I don't see it mentioned in the documentation of `resolve()`, or anywhere else in the docs, that on Windows (but not on other platforms) `resolve()` does *not* resolve a relative path to an absolute path if the file does not exist. As opposed to `absolute()`, which works as expected on any platform. Linux: ``` Python 3.6.9 (default, Oct 8 2020, 12:12:24) [GCC 8.4.0] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

...

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from pathlib import Path file = Path('new.txt') file.exists() False file.resolve() PosixPath('/home/user/new.txt')

Windows:

Python 3.9.2 (tags/v3.9.2:1a79785, Feb 19 2021, 13:44:55) [MSC v.1928 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

...

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from pathlib import Path file = Path('new.txt') file.exists() False file.resolve() WindowsPath('new.txt') file.absolute() WindowsPath('d:/home/new.txt') file.touch() file.resolve() WindowsPath('D:/home/new.txt') file.unlink() file.resolve() WindowsPath('new.txt')

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nosy: +John-Hennig

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