[Python-Dev] os.path.normcase() in site.py

[Jack Jansen]

> I noticed that these days __file__ attributes of modules are case normalized
> (ie. lowercased on case insensitive file systems), or at least the directory
> part. Then I noticed that this is caused by the fact that all sys.path entries
> are case normalized. It turns out that site.py does this, in a function called
> makepath(), added by Fred about 8 months ago.
> 
> I think this is wrong: we should always try to *preserve* case.

There is an added problem with the makepath() stuff that I hadn't reported 
here yet: it has broken MacPython on some non-western machines. Specifically 
I've had reports of people running a Japanese MacOS that things will break if 
they run Python from a pathname that has any non-7-bit-ascii characters in the 
name. Apparently normcase normalizes more than just ascii upper/lowercase 
letters.

And aside from that I fully agree with Just: seeing a stacktrace with all 
lowercase filenames is _very_ disconcerting.

I would disable the case-normalization for MacPython, except that I don't know 
whether it actually has a function. With MacPython's way of finding the 
initial sys.path contents we don't have the Windows-Python problem that we add 
the same directory 5 times (once in uppercase, once in lowercase, once in 
mixed case, once in mixed-case with / for \, etc:-), so if this is what it's 
trying to solve we can take it out easily.
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