[Python-ideas] Re: os.workdir() context manager

On Tue, 14 Sept 2021 at 22:59, David Mertz, Ph.D. wrote:

I think this would be convenient.

And yes, it's not thread safe. But neither is os.chdir() to start with. Someone whose script, or library, wants to chdir can already shoot themselves in the foot. This makes that slightly less likely, not more.

The problem is someone thinking that by using this they would not be shooting themselves on the foot because "wow, a 2021 adition to the stdlib will certainly be thread and async safe". I am with Chris Angelico in that this would be dangerous.

In terms of the bikeshed color, I think putting this in `pathlib` is the best approach for "modern Python."

OTOH, on Pathlib we could have a proper implementation that could take care of _all_ in context file operations, and internally use absolute paths (instead of calling chdir). Such an implementation would work. ``` with Path("/tmp").workdir as mydir: with mydir.open("myfile"): ... ``` and maybe could be practical enough to stirr people away from "chdir".

On Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 7:37 PM Cameron Simpson wrote:

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On 15Sep2021 07:50, Chris Angelico wrote:

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On Wed, Sep 15, 2021 at 7:43 AM Cameron Simpson wrote:

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I know I'm atypical, but I have quite a lot of multithreaded stuff, including command line code. So while it'd be ok to avoid this context manager for my own code, I fear library modules, either stdlib or pypi, quietly using this in their code, making them unuseable in the general case. Unrepairably unuseable, for the user.

Library code shouldn't be changing the working directory, context manager or not. That belongs to the application.

Entirely agree.

I'm concerned that convenient stackable chdir is a bug magnet, and would creep into library code. Maybe not in the stdlib, but there's no point writing such a context manager if it isn't goingg to be used, and therefore it could get used in library code. Imagine when a popular pypi module starts using it internally and breaks a multithreaded app previously relying on it?

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