[issue6208] path separator output ignores shell's path separator: / instead of \

[Laurent Birtz]

Laurent Birtz added the comment:

First, I apologize for my overly harsh tone. A dismissive comment above struck a nerve but that doesn't excuse it.


@Lawrence: from my perspective it is a bug: the Python interpreter doesn't handle paths correctly on MinGW as I'd expect.


As Nick said, the ideal scenario would be to come up with a solution that actually fixes the problem on MinGW. I realize that very few people use MinGW and are impacted by this, so it seems like much effort for little gain. Nevertheless, perhaps the issue could be left open until someone decides to bite the bullet and fix it properly? I'm the one complaining and it's fair that I spend the effort to fix it, but like everyone I have limited time on my hands, and I can't do this now.

FWIW I see three potential solutions. I'm not involved in Python development and I don't know how applicable they are.

1) Modifying os.sep as described above.

Pros: it behaves as expected from the user point-of-view. It makes sense that the separator in this variable is used internally by the module for manipulating the paths. It may be straightforward to implement by making this a property and propagating the change to the Python code and/or interpreter code whenever it is set.

Cons: AFAICT there aren't obvious reasons why someone would modify os.sep currently, so it *should* be fine for backward compatibility for most users, but there is no guarantee.

2) Adding the function os.set_sep(separator). 

Like 1), but it's less transparent to the user, who might set os.sep naively like I did and be surprised that it doesn't work. I think that eliminates all potential backward compatibility issues though.

3) Detect MinGW.

It's brittle but it makes Python behaves as expected for the user -- who might still want/depend on the current behavior however? I'm not a fan of this but it's doable. If the MinGW detection fails then the behavior falls back to the standard Windows behavior. The reverse (assuming MinGW incorrectly) is way more problematic, but I think that the odds of that happening are very low. So essentially if the detection fails then only the MinGW users are impacted.


Nick, correct me if I'm wrong but the target platform for MinGW is mostly Windows itself, aside of this particular issue? The rest of the standard library seems to be working fine on MinGW as it is.


Thank you.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue6208>
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