[Python-Dev] pathlib - current status of discussions

[Koos Zevenhoven]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 7:19 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

You do have a point there. But since bytes pathnames are deprecated on
windows, this seems to lead to supporting both str and bytes in the
protocol, or having two protocols __fspathbytes__ and __fspathstr__
(and one being preferred over the other, potentially even depending on
the platform).,

-Koos