[Python-Dev] Python 1.5.2 modules need porting to 2.0 because of unicode - comments please

[Martin v. Loewis]

> I doubt that we can fix all Unicode related bugs in the 2.0
> stdlib before the final release... let's make this a project 
> for 2.1.

Exactly my feelings. Since we cannot possibly fix all problems, we may
need to change the behaviour later.

If we now silently do the wrong thing, silently changing it to the
then-right thing in 2.1 may break peoples code. So I'm asking that
cases where it does not clearly do the right thing produces an
exception now; we can later fix it to accept more cases, should need
occur.

In the specific case, dropping support for Unicode output in binary
files is the right thing. We don't know what the user expects, so it
is better to produce an exception than to silently put incorrect bytes
into the stream - that is a bug that we still can fix.

The easiest way with the clearest impact is to drop the buffer
interface in unicode objects. Alternatively, not supporting them in
for s# also appears reasonable. Users experiencing the problem in
testing will then need to make an explicit decision how they want to
encode the Unicode objects.

If any expedition of the issue is necessary, I can submit a bug report,
and propose a patch.

Regards,
Martin