[Python-Dev] What to do for bytes in 2.6?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Raymond Hettinger writes:

 > One other thought.  I'm guessing that apps that would
 > care about the distinction are already using unicode
 > and are already treating text as distinct from arrays
 > of bytes.

Indeed.  Mailman, for instance.  Yet Mailman still has problems with
(broken) wire protocol that sneaks past the gate, and causes some
exception that is only handled by the top-level "no matter what goes
wrong, we're not going to lose this post" handler (which literally
shunts it into a queue that only human admins look it -- it's not
Mailman's problem any more.)

However, I am not sure it would help Mailman to catch such bugs to
move from the str/unicode paradigm to the bytes/text paradigm.  The
problem Mailman faces is that there is no (single) Japanese foyer
where the characters have to exchange their muddy "bytes" shoes for
nice clean "unicode" slippers.  Instead, there are a number of ways to
get in, and the translation takes place (and sometimes not) at
different stages.  But this is not a Python issue; it has to do with
Mailman's design.

So I don't think this would be improved if we changed the paradigm
forcibly.  I don't see a benefit to apps like Mailman from changing
over in 2.x.