[Python-Dev] unicode_string future, str -> basestring, fix or feature

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 8:37 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 2, 2014 at 6:44 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>
>> AFACT, in that message Victor was only talking about allowing Unicode
>> filenames.
>>
> ...
>
>>  Finally, in most places Python 2.7 *does* handle Unicode filenames just
>> fine.
>>
>
> I'm a bit confused. In this example:
>
> http://bugs.python.org/issue18695
>
> You are proposing that the issue should be considered a bug and a
> well-written patch accepted?
>
> Or is is just too late for 2.7 ?
>
> Personally I think that having some, but not all file functions accept
> unicode paths is pretty broken....and fixing these kinds of thing will ease
> 2 to 3 transition, so a good thing overall.
>

Agreed.

Given that the claim "Python 2 doesn't support Unicode filenames" is
factually incorrect (in Python 2.7, most filesystem calls in fact do
support Unicode, at least on some platforms), I think individual functions
in the os module that are found lacking should be considered bugs, and if
someone goes through the effort to supply an otherwise acceptable fix, we
shouldn't reject it on the basis that we don't want to consider supporting
Unicode filenames.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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