[Python-ideas] Better stdlib support for Path objects

[Donald Stufft]

> On Oct 7, 2014, at 2:37 PM, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:
> 
> On 10/07/2014 07:24 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>> On Oct 07, 2014, at 02:55 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
>>> 
>>> I find it worse than a disincentive, it makes understanding the code
>>> perceptibly harder, which is a maintenance issue. Having an attribute
>>> that returns the string representation would be a substantial
>>> improvement (as it's the extra parentheses from the str call that I
>>> find the most distracting, that and the code smell that an "explicit
>>> cast" involves).
>> 
>> I realize there's another thing that bugs me about sprinkling str() calls all
>> over the place, and this relates to my other question about whether
>> str()-ability is "the path protocol".
>> 
>> The problem is that if I'm looking at some random code and see:
>> 
>>     my_parser.load(str(path))
>> 
>> I really don't have any idea what 'path' is.  Maybe that's a good thing, but
>> in the few cases where I did this, it seemed bad. ;)
>> 
>> OTOH, if I saw this, it would be a strong clue that path were a pathlib
>> object:
>> 
>>     my_parser.load(path.string_path)
>> 
>> substituting .string_path for whatever color the shed gets painted.
> 
> Neither should be needed:
> 
>    my_parser.load(path)
> 
> should do the trick.
> 
> What was the point of adding pathlib to the stdlib if we cannot use it with the stdlib?

That would be ideal, however very few (any?) APIs in Python stdlib supports pathlib as it stands. Passing paths around is sprinkled all over the stdlib and history suggests it’ll be a fairly lengthy process to actually get all of those stdlib locations figured out.

That doesn’t even begin to touch on all of the places *not* in the stdlib that expects str based paths, some of which are C code so making them use a Path object isn’t the easiest thing ever.

> 
> Having a __strpath__ and/or __bytespath__ would also allow third-party path libraries to be utilized.
> 

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Donald Stufft
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