On Fri, Jan 2, 2015, at 20:50, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Because what _not_ having a cross-platform wrapper gets you is windows and mac left behind
Really? I would expect that Windows is probably the *easiest* platform to implement this functionality, as it has a single, standard, stable API for moving files to trash. (Or so I am lead to believe.) You can probably use that API via ctypes, or via pywin32.
Why would someone who is developing on Linux and has no pre-made library function to call bother with that? If being cross-platform isn't easy, it won't happen. You see it now with the lack of any support for "call glob on arguments on windows and not on unix" [because the shell handles it on unix] whether directly, in argparse, or in fileinput - today, nothing ever calls glob, and so people calling such scripts on windows can't use wildcards (glob is also different from windows wildcards in subtle ways)
Getting OS X right is very complicated, as Andrew has so ably explained.
In Linux and other Unixes, the situation is like OS X, only more so since there's no one single authority.
However, what authority there is does not allegedly demand that you present dialog boxes and admin elevation prompts to the user (this has been asserted, but no citation has been given).
You have a choice of desktop environments, which may or may not provide a move-to-trash API, including no desktop environment at all. Gnome provides an API for moving to trash, but I don't know how well it supports the freedesktop standard; KDE supports the freedesktop standard, but I don't know if it provides an API that can be called. XFCE has partial support.
I don't see why you need to call an API to the desktop enviroment. The entire point of the spec is to provide compatibility _between_ implementations on the same filesystem - you can quit gnome and log into KDE and see the same trash. Python would just be a separate implementation that stands by itself.