On Wed, 10 Feb 2021 at 14:33, Anders Munch <ajm@flonidan.dk> wrote:

On Tue, 9 Feb 2021 at 16:52, Anders Munch <ajm@flonidan.dk> wrote:

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How about swapping around "locale" and None? That is, make "locale" the new default that emits a warning, and encoding=None emits no warning. That has the advantage that old code can be updated to say encoding=None, and then it will work on both old and new Pythons without warning. Paul Moore [mailto:p.f.moore@gmail.com] I don't understand why working code should have to change *twice*.

The idea is to make is so that working code only needs to change once, even when supporting multiple Python versions. That one change is to add either an explicit encoding=None (for backwards-compatibility) or an explicit encoding='utf-8' (because that was intended all along). No twice about it, one change.

But then people who added an explicit utf-8 encoding need to remove the encoding argument again once the default value changes. Your proposal leads to a situation where no-one leaves the encoding argument to default. If we're going to permanently discourage omitting the encoding argument, we should just make it mandatory (a change that I'll argue against, but no-one is currently proposing it, luckily). Paul

On Wed, 10 Feb 2021 at 14:33, Anders Munch <ajm@flonidan.dk> wrote:

On Tue, 9 Feb 2021 at 16:52, Anders Munch <ajm@flonidan.dk> wrote:

...

...

How about swapping around "locale" and None? That is, make "locale" the new default that emits a warning, and encoding=None emits no warning. That has the advantage that old code can be updated to say encoding=None, and then it will work on both old and new Pythons without warning. Paul Moore [mailto:p.f.moore@gmail.com] I don't understand why working code should have to change *twice*.

The idea is to make is so that working code only needs to change once, even when supporting multiple Python versions. That one change is to add either an explicit encoding=None (for backwards-compatibility) or an explicit encoding='utf-8' (because that was intended all along). No twice about it, one change.

But then people who added an explicit utf-8 encoding need to remove the encoding argument again once the default value changes. Your proposal leads to a situation where no-one leaves the encoding argument to default. If we're going to permanently discourage omitting the encoding argument, we should just make it mandatory (a change that I'll argue against, but no-one is currently proposing it, luckily). Paul