This seems to be overlapping quite a lot with the recent discussion on object-oriented paths (http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2012-October/016338.html) and this question of how paths are represented on different systems was discussed quite extensively.  I'm not sure where the thread left off, but if PEP 428 is still going ahead then maybe this is something that should be brought into it.

David


On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 7:15 AM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
Bruce Leban wrote:

If you change the semantics so that it either (1) it always always includes a trailing / or (2) it includes a trailing slash if the two paths have it in common, then you don't have the weirdness that in this case it returns a slash and in others it doesn't. I am slightly inclined to (1) at this point.

But then the common prefix of "/a/b" and "/a/c" would be "/a/",
which would be very unexpected -- usually the dirname of a path is
not considered to include a trailing slash.

The special treatment of the root directory is no weirder than it
is anywhere else. It's already special, since in unix it's the
only case where a trailing slash is semantically significant.
(To the kernel, at least -- a few command line utilities break this
rule, but they're screwy.)

--
Greg

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