[Python-ideas] PEP 428 - object-oriented filesystem paths

[Greg Ewing]

Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Oct 2012 22:43:02 +0100
> Arnaud Delobelle <arnodel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
 >
>>Naive question: how do you deal with HFS+, which is case-preserving
>>but on most machines case-insensitive?
> 
> I don't know. How does os.path deal with it?

Not all that well, apparently. From the docs for os.path:

os.path.normcase(path)
     Normalize the case of a pathname. On Unix and Mac OS X, this returns the
     path unchanged; on case-insensitive filesystems, it converts the path to
     lowercase. On Windows, it also converts forward slashes to backward slashes.

This is partially self-contradictory, since many MacOSX filesystems are
actually case-insensitive; it depends on the particular filesystem concerned.
Worse, different parts of the same path can have different case sensitivities.
Also, with network file systems, not all paths are necessarily case-insensitive
on Windows.

So there's really no certain way to compare pure paths for equality. Basing
it on which OS is running your code is no more than a guess.

-- 
Greg