[Python-Dev] Python3 "complexity"

[Stefan Ring]

> just became harder to use for that purpose.

The entire discussion reminds me very much of the situation with file
names in OS X. Whenever I want to look at an old zip file or tarball
which happens to have been lying around on my hard drive for a decade
or more, I can't because OS X insist that file names be encoded in
UTF-8 and just throw errors if that requirement is not met. And
certainly I cannot be required to re-encode all files to the
then-favored encoding continually – although favors don’t change often
and I’m willing to bet that UTF-8 is here to stay, but it has already
happened twice in my active computer life (DOS -> latin-1 -> UTF-8).

Going back to the old tarballs, OS X is completely useless for
handling them as a result of their encoding decision, and I have to
move to a Linux machine which just does not care about encodings.

PS I was very relieved to find out that os.listdir() – jut to pick one
file name-related function – will still return bytes if requested, as
it is not at all uncommon (at least for me) to have conflicting file
name encodings in different parts of a filesystem.