[Python-ideas] Better stdlib support for Path objects

[Barry Warsaw]

Over in issue 22570, I lament the fact that while pathlib is awesome, its
wider support in the stdlib is pretty sparse.  I've tried to convert parts of
a medium sized Python 3 application from os.path to pathlib and found this
lack of support rather demotivating.  Yes, it's fairly easy to wrap Path
objects in str() to pass them to stdlib methods that expect only strings, but
it's a lot of work in user code and I find that the resulting str()s are
distracting.  It's a disincentive.

Antoine provided a link to a previous discussion[*] but that didn't go very
far.

One simple solution would be to sprinkle str() calls in various stdlib
methods, but I'm not sure if that would fail miserably in the face of bytes
paths (if the original stdlib API even accepts bytes paths).  The suggestion
in the issue is to add a "path protocol" and the referenced article suggests
.strpath and .bytespath.  OTOH, isn't str() and bytes() enough?

I don't have any other brilliant ideas, but I opened the issue and am posting
here to see if we can jump start another discussion for Python 3.5.  I'd
*like* to use more Paths, but not at the expense of my own code's readability.
Yes, I'd sacrifice a bit of readability in the stdlib, especially if that
would cover more use cases.

Cheers,
-Barry

[*] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2014-May/027869.html
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