[Python-Dev] Pathlib enhancements - acceptable inputs and outputs for __fspath__ and os.fspath()

[Nick Coghlan]

On 19 April 2016 at 21:55, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

> I really want to know.  I'm not 100% sure that's the right way to go,
> mostly because Nick and Brett are signed up for polymorphism.  But I
> sure haven't seen any explicit arguments for polymorphism, though I've
> asked for them.  AFAICS, everybody just assumed that because some
> related APIs are polymorphic, this one should be, too, and dove into
> the problem of how to make a polymorphic API safe for Python 3.
>

In my case, it's ~5 years of peripheral involvement in porting the Fedora
ecosystem to Python 3. I haven't personally done that much of the actual
porting work, but I've spent plenty of time talking to the folks that are,
and tweaking various things to make their lives easier where I could make
the case that there was either a benefit to Python 3, or at least no harm
to it.

The gist of the motivation for bytes/str polymorphism here is similar to
that for restoring __mod__ polymorphism in
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0461/: the bytes/str duality is as much
a fact of life when dealing with OS interfaces as it is when dealing with
wire protocols, so if __fspath__ is polymorphic, then it's easier for
compatibility modules like six and future to define their own "fspath"
helper functions that work on both Python 2 and Python 3 across all
supported platforms.

This is also why I ended up proposing pushing the complexity down into a
documented-but-underscore-prefixed API: folks writing pure Python 3
application code *really* shouldn't need to worry about the bytes support
in the protocol, but for operating system level use cases, not having it
readily available to 2/3 compatible Python code would be a pain.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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