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

[Andrew Barnert]

On Wednesday, February 10, 2016 12:47 AM, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 2016-02-10 9:30 GMT+01:00 Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com>:
>>  Whether removing the bytes interface is feasible, given that there's
>>  then no way that works across Python 2 and 3 of writing code that
>>  manipulates the sort of bytes-that-use-multiple-encodings data that
>>  you mention, is a separate issue.

Well, there's a surrogate-escape backport on PyPI (I think there's a standalone one, and one in python-future), so you _could_ do everything the same as in 3.x.

Depending on what you're doing, you may also need to use the io module instead of file (which may just mean "from io import open", but could mean more work), wrap the stdio streams explicitly, manually decode argv, etc. But someone could write a six-like module (or add it to six) that does all of that. It may be a little slower and more memory-intensive in 2.7 than in 3.x, but for most apps, that doesn't matter. The big problem would be third-party libraries (and stdlib modules like csv) that want to use bytes in 2.x; convincing them all to support full-on-unicode in 2.x might be more trouble than it's worth. Still, if I were feeling the pain of maintaining lots of linux-bytes-Windows-unicode-2.7 code, I'd try it and see how far I get.

> It's annoying that 8 years after the release of Python 3.0, Python 3
> is still stuck by Python 2 :-(

I understand the frustration, but... time already goes too fast at my age; don't skip me ahead almost a whole year to December 2016. :)

Also, unless you're the one guy who actually abandoned 2.6 for 3.0, it's probably more useful to count from 2.7, 3.2, or the no-2.8 declaration, which are all about 5 years ago.