[Distutils] string types for paths in PEP 517

[Paul Moore]

On 5 September 2017 at 09:00, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
> I considered this. It's *potentially* a problem, but I think we should
> not try to deal with it for now:
>
> - Normally, temp files will go in /tmp - so it should be fine to
> construct paths of entirely ascii characters.
> - Frontends that want the wheel to end up elsewhere can ask for it in a
> tmp directory first and then move it, so there's a workaround if it
> becomes an issue.
> - We already have workarounds for the commonest case of UTF-8 paths + C
> locale: ignore the locale and treat paths as UTF-8.
> - The 'right' way to deal with it on Unix is to make all paths bytes,
> which would introduce a similar issue on Windows. If paths have to be
> bytes in some situations and unicode in others, both frontends and
> backends need extra complexity to handle that.
> - If your non-ascii username breaks stuff on Python 2... Python 3 is
> ready to make your life easier.

+1 on this
Paul