[Python-Dev] Python-3.0, unicode, and os.environ

[Toshio Kuratomi]

James Y Knight wrote:
> On Dec 9, 2008, at 6:04 AM, Anders J. Munch wrote:
>> The typical application will just obliviously use os.listdir(dir) and
>> get the default elide-and-warn behaviour for un-decodable names. That
>> rare special application
> 
> I guess this is a new definition of rare special application: "an
> application which deals with user-specified files".
> 
> This is the problem I see in having two parallel APIs: people keep
> saying "most applications can just go ahead and use the [broken] unicode
> string API". If there was a unicode API and a bytes API, but everyone
> was clear that "always use the bytes API" is the right thing to do,
> that'd be okay... But, since even python-dev members are saying that
> only a rare special app needs to care about working with users' existing
> files, I'm rather worried this API design will cause most programs
> written in python to be broken. Which seems a shame.
> 
I agree with you which was part of why I raised this subject but I also
think that using the warnings module to issue a warning and ignore the
entire problematic entry is a reasonable compromise.  Hopefully it will
become obvious to people that it's a python3 wart at some point in the
future and we'll re-examine the default.  But until then, having a
printed warning that individual apps can turn into an exception seems
like it is less broken than the other alternatives the "rare special
application" people can live with :-)

-Toshio

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