[Python-Dev] Discussion on fspath: please wait for a PEP

[Koos Zevenhoven]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 2:52 PM, Victor Stinner
<victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm unable to count the number of threads about the fspath protocol.
> It's even more difficult to count the total number of emails. IMHO
> everyone had enough time to give him/her opinion.

Couldn't agree more.

> We even had multiple
> summaries :-)

I'm not quite as sure about this. Maybe the meaning of "summary" in
the subculture of python lists is different from the one I know.

> Can you please wait for a PEP? Brett Canon and Ethan Furman are
> working on a PEP. So please give them time to write it.

I wonder what happened there...

> The PEP should summarize the discussion and help a lot to make
> concrete progress on the design (avoid restarting to discuss the same
> points forever). I don't expect that more emails would add anything at
> the current state of the discussion.

Again, agreed, and this part makes me feel relieved. Personally, I got
tired of the discussion a long time ago, but felt it had to be
finished.

> I think that we have enough other topics to discuss in the meanwhile ;-)

No doubt about that.

> FYI there is already an article about fspath/pathlib on LWN. Here is a
> free link until the article is freely accessible:
>
> "Python looks at paths" By Jake Edge (April 13, 2016)
> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/683350/4f52334af09653c8/

Wow. Wasn't expecting that. A whole story about the notorious "path
discussions"! (well, up to some date). Anyway, the beginning seems
fairly accurate, but then, among other things, it fails to mention
this for example:

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2016-March/039179.html
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2016-April/039595.html

Since I did not get any responses to that suggestion, it felt like a
dead end, and I continued experimenting with other things and ended up
taking the approach of "subclassing path-types from str gives more
complete pathlib support, but the objects should not pretend to be
strings in every way". By the way, I even implemented this, which I
suppose I failed to mention. Admittedly, it became a little awkward in
the end, but the main point was to provide a smooth transition from a
str world to a PurePath-subclass world (as opposed to a discrete one
like Py3k).

While I was working on that, the discussions on -dev seemed to have
reopened the gate at exactly that 'dead end' I mentioned before, and
had started to step through it.

-Koos

>
> Victor
> _______________________________________________
> Python-Dev mailing list
> Python-Dev at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
> Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/k7hoven%40gmail.com