
On 16Aug2016 1915, Brendan Barnwell wrote:
On 2016-08-16 17:14, Steve Dower wrote:
The existence of bugs in other applications is not a good reason to help people create new bugs.
I haven't been following all the details in this thread, but isn't the whole purpose of this proposed change to accommodate code (apparently on Linux?) that is buggy in that it assumes it can use bytes for paths without knowing the encoding? It seems like from one perspective allowing bytes in paths is just helping to accommodate a certain very widespread class of bugs.
Using bytes on Linux (in Python) is incorrect but works reliably, while using bytes on Windows is incorrect and unreliable. This change makes it incorrect and reliable on both platforms. I said at the start the correct alternative would be to actually force all developers to use str for paths everywhere. That seems infeasible, so I'm trying to at least improve the situation for Windows users who are running code written by Linux developers. Hence there are tradeoffs, rather than perfection. (Also, you took my quote out of context - it was referring to the fact that non-Python developers sometimes fail to get path encoding correct too. But your question was fair.) Cheers, Steve