[Python-checkins] gh-91181: Add a What's New entry for dropping bytes support for `sys.path` (GH-94918)

[miss-islington]

https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/5a34287b5dc75293bea02489feda22b4b6b28e3e
commit: 5a34287b5dc75293bea02489feda22b4b6b28e3e
branch: 3.11
author: Miss Islington (bot) <31488909+miss-islington at users.noreply.github.com>
committer: miss-islington <31488909+miss-islington at users.noreply.github.com>
date: 2022-07-16T19:23:57-07:00
summary:

gh-91181: Add a What's New entry for dropping bytes support for `sys.path` (GH-94918)

(cherry picked from commit ec4745b5f2c2a460f12c97243c5b7d875f24b0c8)

Co-authored-by: Brett Cannon <brett at python.org>

files:
M Doc/whatsnew/3.11.rst

diff --git a/Doc/whatsnew/3.11.rst b/Doc/whatsnew/3.11.rst
index a5b9c31afac25..58ecf335f87b1 100644
--- a/Doc/whatsnew/3.11.rst
+++ b/Doc/whatsnew/3.11.rst
@@ -383,6 +383,13 @@ Other Language Changes
   coerces negative zero to zero after rounding to the format precision.  See
   :pep:`682` for more details.  (Contributed by John Belmonte in :gh:`90153`.)
 
+* Bytes are no longer accepted on :attr:`sys.path`.  Support broke sometime
+  between Python 3.2 and 3.6 with no one noticing until after Python 3.10.0
+  was released. Bringing back support would also be problematic due to
+  interactions between :option:`-b` and :attr:`sys.path_importer_cache` when
+  there is a mixture of strings and bytes keys.
+  (Contributed by Thomas Grainger in :gh:`91181`.)
+
 Other CPython Implementation Changes
 ====================================