[Python-Dev] Bytes path support

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ben Hoyt writes:

 > Fair enough. I don't quite understand, though -- why is the "official
 > policy" to kill something that's "essential" on *nix?

They're not essential on *nix.  Unix paths at the OS level are "just
bytes" (even on Mac, although the most common Mac filesystem does
enforce UTF-8 Unicode NFD).  This use case is now perfectly well
served by codecs.

However, there are a lot of applications that involve reading a file
name from a directory, and passing it verbatim to another OS
function.  This case can be handled now using the surrogateescape
error handler, but when these APIs were introduced we didn't even have
a reliable way to roundtrip filenames because a Unix filename doesn't
need to be a string of characters from *any* character set.

And there's the undeniable convenience of treating file names as
opaque objects in those applications.

Regards,