[Barry]
So, let's tease out what the Right solution would be, and then see how close or if we can get there for 2.1. I've no clue what behavior Mac and Windows users would /like/ to see -- what would be most natural for them? OTOH, I like the Un*x behavior and I think I'd want to see platforms like Cygwin and MacOSX-on-non-HFS+ get as close to that as possible.
Is it better to have uniform behavior across all platforms (modulo places like some Windows network fs's where that may not be possible)? Should Python's import semantics be identical across all platforms? OTOH, this is where the rubber meets the road so to speak, so some incompatibilities may be impossible to avoid.
And what about Jython?
Jython only does a File().exists() (which is similar to a stat()). So on WinNT, jython is behaving wrongly: Jython 2.0 on java1.3.0 (JIT: null) Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
import stringio stringio.__file__ 'I:\\java\\Jython.CVS\\Lib\\stringio.py'
Yet I can't remember any bug reports where this have caused problems. regards, finn