[Python-Dev] pathlib - current status of discussions

[Chris Barker]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 10:40 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz>
wrote:
>
> So the ONLY thing
>> you should do with it is pass it along to another low level system
>> call.
>>
>
> Not quite -- you can separate it into components and
> work with them. Essentially the same set of operations
> that os.path provides.
>

ahh yes, so while posix claims that paths are "just a char*", they are
really bytes where we can assume that the byte with value 2F is the pathsep
(and that 2E separates an extension?), so I suppose os.path is useful. But
I still think that most of us should never deal with bytes paths, and the
few that need to should just work with the low level functions and be done
with it.

One more though came up just now: there are different level sof
abstractions and representations for paths. We don't want to make Path a
subclass of string, because Path is supposed to be a higher level
abstraction -- good.

then at the bottom of the stack, we NEED the bytes level path, because that
what ultimately gets passed to the OS.

THe legacy from the single-byte encoding days is that bytes and strings
were the same, so we could let people work with nice human readable
strings, while also working with byte paths in the same way -- but those
days are gone -- py3 make s clear (and important) distiction between nice
human readable strings  and the bytes that represent them.

So: why use strings as the lingua franca of paths? i.e. the basis of the
path protocol. maybe we should support only two path representations:

1) A "proper" path object -- i.e. pathlib.Path or anything else that
supports the path protocol.

2) the bytes that the OS actually needs.

this would mean that the protocol would be to have a __pathbytes__() method
that woulde return the bytes that should be passed off to the OS.

A posix Path implementation could store that internal bytes representation,
so it could pass it off unchanged if that's all you need to do.

Any current API that takes bytes could be made to easily work.

I'm SURE I'm missing something really big here, but it seems like maybe
it's better to get farther from "strings as paths" rather than closer to
it....

-CHB


-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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