[Python-Dev] Windows: Remove support of bytes filenames in the os module?

[Paul Moore]

On 9 February 2016 at 10:13, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> IMHO we have to put a line somewhere between Python 2 and Python 3.
> For some specific use cases, there is no good solution which works on
> both Python versions.
>
> For filenames, there is no simple design on Python 2. bytes is the
> natural choice on UNIX, whereas Unicode is preferred on Windows. But
> it's difficult to handle two types in the same code base. As a
> consequence, most users use bytes on Python 2, which is a bad choice
> for Windows...
>
> On Python 3, it's much simpler: always use Unicode. Again, the PEP 383
> helps on UNIX.

So if you were proposing "drop the bytes APIs everywhere" that might
be acceptable (for Python 3). But of course it makes porting harder,
so it's probably not a good idea until Python 2 is no longer relevant.

Paul