[Python-Dev] Is adding support for os.PathLike an enhancement or bugfix?

[Koos Zevenhoven]

On Thu, May 4, 2017 at 1:07 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> On 5/3/2017 2:15 PM, Brett Cannon wrote:
>>
>> My allergies have hit me hard so I'm not thinking at full capacity, but
>> did we ever decide if supporting os.PathLike in the stdlib was viewed as an
>> enhancement or bugfix? Specifically I'm thinking of
>> https://bugs.python.org/issue30218 for adding support to
>> shutil.unpack_archive() and whether it should be backported to 3.6.
>
>
> On the face of it, that particular issue looks like an enhancement that
> should have gone into 3.6

Agreed.

> (if ever), but did not.  I notice that
> https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0519/#implementation
> did not include "Update shutil", so it was not done, at least not
> completely.

Shutil was among the most important to be updated, IMO.

I had made some sort of list of affected modules elsewhere [1]:
ntpath, posixpath, os.scandir, os.[other stuff], DirEntry (tempted to
say os.DirEntry, but that is
not true), shutil.[stuff], (io.)open, fileinput, filecmp, zipfile,
tarfile, tempfile (for the 'dir' keyword arguments), maybe even glob
and fnmatch (are the patterns paths?)

It looks like what made it to PEP519 was mainly this:

"It is expected that most APIs in Python's standard library that
currently accept a file system path will be updated appropriately to
accept path objects (whether that requires code or simply an update to
documentation will vary)."

> Was shutil updated at all?  Is unpack_archive the only shutil function not
> updated?  If so, I could see the omission as a bug.
>
> If the patch for 30218 were applied in 3.6, would the doc
> https://docs.python.org/3/library/shutil.html#shutil.unpack_archive
> need to be changed, with a note "Added in 3.6.2: filename can be any
> pathlike object"?  If so, it is an enhancement.

Regardless of bugfix vs enhancement semantics, that seems like a good
thing to do.

-- Koos

[1] e.g. in this thread somewhere:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2016-April/039827.html


-- 
+ Koos Zevenhoven + http://twitter.com/k7hoven +