Neil Hodgson wrote:
M.-A. Lemburg:
I don't really buy this "trick": what if you happen to have a home directory with Unicode characters in it ?
Most people choose account names and thus home directory names that are compatible with their preferred locale settings: German users are unlikely to choose an account name that uses Japanese characters.
It's naive to assume that all people in Germany using the German locale have German names ;-) E.g. we have a large Japanese community living here in Düsseldorf. If that example does not convince you, just have a look at all the Chinese restaurants in cities around the world - I'm sure that quite a few of the owners will want to use their correctly written name as account name. Unicode makes this possible and while it may not be in wide-spread use nowadays, things will definitely change over the next few years as more and more OSes and platforms will introduce native Unicode support.
Unicode is only necessary for file names that are outside your default locale. An administration utility may need to visit multiple user's home directories and so is more likely to encounter files with names that can not be represented in its default locale.
I'm not sure why you bring up an administration tool: isn't the discussion about being able to load Python modules from directories with Unicode path components ?
I think it would be better if sys.path could include unicode entries but expect the code will rarely be exercised.
I think that sys.path should always use Unicode for non-ASCII path names - this would make it locale setting independent, which is what we should strive for in Py3k: locales are much easier to handle at the application level and only introduce portability problems if used at the OS or C lib level. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Software directly from the Source
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