[Python-Dev] Add transform() and untranform() methods

[Victor Stinner]

2013/11/15 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>:
> The reason I'm now putting some effort into better documenting the
> status quo for codec handling in Python 3 and filing off some of the
> rough edges (rather than proposing adding any new APIs to Python 3.x)
> is because the users I care about in this matter are web developers
> that already make use of the binary codecs and are adopting the
> single-source approach to handle supporting both Python 2 and Python
> 3. Armin Ronacher is the one who's been most vocal about the problem,
> but he's definitely not alone.

Except of Armin Ronacher, I never see anyway blocked when trying to
port a project to Python3 because of these bytes=>bytes and str=>str
codecs. I did a quick search on Google but I failed to find a question
"how can I write .encode("hex") or .encode("zlib") in Python 3?". It
was just a quick search, it's likely that many developers hit this
Python 3 regression, but I'm confident that developers are able to
workaround themself this regression (ex: use directly the right Python
module).

I saw a lot of huge code base ported to Python 3 without the need of
these codecs. For example: Django which is a web framework has been
ported on Python 3, I know that Armin Ronacher also works on web
things (I don't know what exactly).

> A new API for binary transforms is potentially an academically
> interesting concept, but it solves zero current real world problems.

I would like to reply the same for these codecs: they are not solving
any real world problem :-)

Victor