Does This Scare You?

[Terry Reedy]

On 8/21/2016 9:08 PM, eryk sun wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 12:44 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>> "Trying to be" cross-platform? The point of these path modules is to
>> *be* cross-platform. I can't call Windows APIs on my Linux box (short
>> of messing around with VMs or Wine or something, which are
>> dependencies that Python doesn't need). So yes, these *are*
>> cross-platform, and that's not scary, that's deliberate design.
>
> Sorry for the wording SNAFU there. Of course it's cross-platform. But
> I think it's a dubious check. On Windows itself I would never try what
> it's attempting to do. I would just call GetFullPathName to see if the
> path changes to use the \\.\ device namespace. I doubt that the 3
> examples I gave are the only places that this simplistic
> implementation of 'is_reserved" fails. It's giving a dangerous
> impression to the user that the path will be safe to use on Windows
> when that's not the case.

Since the function is there, please consider opening an issue and 
submitting a patch to improve it.  Also, could the doc be improved to 
say that is_reserved() == False might be wrong?  It is possible to 
broaden the test so that too many names, rather than too, are marked as 
reserved?  Better to say "don't use" for a good name rather than 'use' 
for a reserved name.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy