[Python-Dev] File system path encoding on Windows

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

tritium-list at sdamon.com writes:

 > Once you get to var lengths like that, arcane single character flags start
 > looking preferable.  How about "PYTHONWINLEGACY" to just turn it all on or
 > off.  If the code breaks on one thing, it obviously isn't written to use the
 > other two, so might as well shut them all off.

Since Steve is thinking about three separate PEPs (among other things,
they might be implemented on different timelines), that's not really
possible (placing the features under control of one switch at
different times would be an unacceptable compatibility break).

Anyway, it's not *obvious* that your premise is true, because code
isn't written to do any of those things.  It's written to process
bytes agnostically.  The question is what does the environment look
like.  Steve obviously has a perspective on environment which suggests
that these aspects are often decoupled because in Windows the actual
filesystem is never bytes-oriented.  I don't know if it's possible to
construct a coherent environment where these aspects are decoupled,
but I can't say it's impossible, either.