[python-committers] 3.0rc2 schedule

[Fred Drake]

On Oct 2, 2008, at 9:39 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> If you don't make a habit of borking your own filesystems with dodgy
> filenames, it runs fine.

I really hope the individuals making this argument are being  
facetious.  I don't think this is the source of the problem at all.

The expect the most common occurrence of the problem comes from  
sharing of drives between operating systems and individual  
configurations; those ubiquitous little USB "thumb" drives get shared  
between all kinds of computers these days as people share files they  
don't want to or can't pass over a network for whatever reason.   
(Those drives might actually serve other purposes first, such as being  
music players, and so may have no other interfaces for transferring  
files.)

If someone hands me a USB flash drive with filenames encoded in  
whatever is reasonable for them, I should be able to use Python tools  
on the files without having to use non-Python tools to copy or rename  
the file first.  The possibility of a conflicting encoding is  
increased if the source machine is configured to use a very different  
encoding, clearly, but that's not that unusual.

The world is smaller than it used to be, and we really need to  
understand that.


   -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>