[Python-Dev] casefolding in pathlib (PEP 428)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Apr 11 23:11:21 CEST 2013


Hey Antoine,

Some of my Dropbox colleagues just drew my attention to the occurrence
of case folding in pathlib.py. Basically, case folding as an approach
to comparing pathnames is fatally flawed. The issues include:

- most OSes these days allow the mounting of both case-sensitive and
case-insensitive filesystems simultaneously

- the case-folding algorithm on some filesystems is burned into the
disk when the disk is formatted

- case folding requires domain knowledge, e.g. turkish dotless I

- normalization is a mess, even on OSX, where it's better defined than elsewhere

One or more of them may reply-all to this message with more details.

--
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)


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