Nich Mathewson has developed a patch that allows to access stat fields by name, rather than by tuple index, while preserving backwards compatibility, see
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=305470&aid=462296&group_id=5470
(I still have a comment on the patch.)
One issue is non-posix stat implementations, which currently live in riscos and mac. Any comments on the patch are appreciated, in particular with regard to the following question:
- should we attempt to modify those modules even though we cannot test the modifications, or should we accept that field access will not be possible on these platforms until somebody with platform access fixes them?
We should attempt to fix these implementations and notify the authors.
- should the patch go into 2.2 (personally, I'd like to see it integrated)?
Yes. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)