[Python-Dev] Windows: Remove support of bytes filenames in the os module?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Chris Barker - NOAA Federal writes:

 > All I can say is "ouch". Hard to call it a regression to no longer
 > allow this mess...

We can't "disallow" the mess, it's embedded in the lunatic computing
environment (which I happen to live in).  We can't even stop people
from using existing Python programs abusing bytes-oriented APIs.  All
we can do is make it harder for people to port to Python 3, and that
would be bad because it's much easier to refactor once you're in
Python 3.

And as Paul points out, it works fine in ASCII-compatible one-byte
environments (and probably in ISO-2022-compatible 8-bit multibyte
environments, too -- the big problems are the abominations known as
Shift JIS and Big5).  Please, let's leave it alone.