[Python-Dev] Extending os.chown() to accept user/group names

[Barry Warsaw]

On May 25, 2011, at 10:24 AM, Sandro Tosi wrote:

>before opening an issue to track the request, I'd like to ask advice
>here about this: extend os.chown() to accept even user/group names
>instead of just uid and gid.
>
>On a Unix system, you can call chown command passing either id or
>names, so it seems (to me at least) natural to expect os.chown() to
>behave similarly; but that's not the case.
>
>I can see os module wants to be a thin wrapper around OS syscalls and
>chown(2) accepts only uid/gid as input, so what would be best: extend
>os.chown() or provide a chown() function in shutil module for this
>purpose?

I think it would be a nice feature, and I can see the conflict.  OT1H you want
to keep os.chown() a thin wrapper, but OTOH you'd rather not have to add a
new, arguably more difficult to discover, function.  Given those two choices,
I still think I'd come down on adding a new function and shutil.chown() seems
an appropriate place for it.

Cheers,
-Barry

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