On 31 March 2016 at 10:09, Sven R. Kunze srkunze@mail.de wrote:
On 30.03.2016 18:49, Ethan Furman wrote:
A solution here is to return what you receive:
- str coming in? str going out
- path coming in? path going out
Of course, this gets muddied when multiple path/str arguments are accepted coming in.
I have bad memories about this kind of approach. It reminds me of the peculiarity of os(.path)-related functions in Python 2 that return either bytes or unicode depending on the argument's type.
That's utterly confusing and I remember us hunting bugs related to this for hours (basically looking for "where does this byte string come from?").
Any suggestions for a better design? It might be nice for someone to write a blog entry or posting somewhere on "how to upgrade your 3rd party library to support pathlib" and one of the harder questions will be "how do I decide whether to return a string or a path?" If we had a good recommendation for this, it might help adoption.
Paul