On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

* -1 on including Windows specific globbing support in the API
* -0 on including cross platform globbing support in the initial iteration of the API (that could be done later as a separate RFE instead)

Agreed.  Globbing or filtering support should not hold this up.  If that part isn't settled, just don't include it and work out what it should be as a future enhancement.

* +1 on a new section in the PEP covering rejected design options (calling it iterdir, returning a 2-tuple instead of a dedicated DirEntry type)

+1.  IMNSHO, one of the most important part of PEPs: capturing the entire decision process to document the "why nots".

* regarding "why not a 2-tuple", we know from experience that operating systems evolve and we end up wanting to add additional info to this kind of API. A dedicated DirEntry type lets us adjust the information returned over time, without breaking backwards compatibility and without resorting to ugly hacks like those in some of the time and stat APIs (or even our own codec info APIs)
* it would be nice to see some relative performance numbers for NFS and CIFS network shares - the additional network round trips can make excessive stat calls absolutely brutal from a speed perspective when using a network drive (that's why the stat caching added to the import system in 3.3 dramatically sped up the case of having network drives on sys.path, and why I thought AJ had a point when he was complaining about the fact we didn't expose the dirent data from os.listdir)

fwiw, I wouldn't wait for benchmark numbers.

A needless stat call when you've got the information from an earlier API call is already brutal. It is easy to compute from existing ballparks remote file server / cloud access: ~100ms, local spinning disk seek+read: ~10ms. fetch of stat info cached in memory on file server on the local network: ~500us.  You can go down further to local system call overhead which can vary wildly but should likely be assumed to be at least 10us.

You don't need a benchmark to tell you that adding needless >= 500us-100ms blocking operations to your program is bad. :)

-gps