On 06:07 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Guido van Rossum wrote:
On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 10:53 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I find it interesting to note that the only users in this discussion
who
actually have these problems in real life all have this attitude.
For file managers and similar tools I am absolutely 100% in agreement
-- that's why the binary APIs are there.
Most apps aren't file managers or ftp clients though. The sky is not
falling.
Most apps aren't file managers or ftp clients but when they interact
with files (for instance, a file selection dialog) they need to be able
to show the user all the relevant files. So on an app-by-app basis the
need for this is high.
While I tend to agree emphatically with this, the *real* solution here
is a path-abstraction library. In separate discussions, the difficulty
of getting such a thing into the standard library has been discussed,
due to the wide variety of opinions as to what it should look like (and
the shocking level of difficulty involved in making such a thing really
work correctly).
I'd be very happy to talk to you off-list about my ideas for such a
thing, but I'd rather not resurrect yet another tedious discussion here
just now :).
On a code basis, I'd hope that most file
selection dialogs are pulled out into libraries... but that still
doesn't help me identify when someone would expect that asking python
for a list of all files in a directory or a specific set of files in a
directory should, without warning, return only a subset of them. In
what situations is this appropriate behaviour?
If you say listdir(unicode) on a POSIX OS, your program is saying "I
only know how to deal with unicode results from this function, so please
only give me those.". If your program is smart enough to deal with
bytes, then you would have asked for bytes, no? Returning only
filenames which can be properly decoded makes sense. Otherwise everyone
needs to learn about this highly confusing issue, even for the simplest
scripts.
Skipping undecodable values is good enough that it will work 90% of the
time. When you need to get to 100%, it won't be impossible - the bytes
APIs will be there. In the longer term, hopefully some path abstraction
will eventually be there too. We should not wait for a perfectly
correct path abstraction to arrive before providing the primitives to do
it yourself, though.
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