[Python-ideas] Allow manual creation of DirEntry objects

[Guido van Rossum]

It sounds fine to just submit a patch to add and document the DirEntry
constructor. I don't think anyone intended to disallow your use case, it's
more likely that nobody thought of it.

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 12:35 PM, Brendan Moloney <moloney at ohsu.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have been using the 'scandir' package (https://github.com/benhoyt/
> scandir) for a while now to
> speed up some directory tree processing code. Since Python 3.5 now
> includes 'os.scandir' in the
> stdlib (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0471/) I decided to try to
> make my code work with
> the built-in version if available.
>
> The first issue I hit was that the 'DirEntry' class was not actually being
> exposed
> (http://bugs.python.org/issue27038). However in the discussion of that
> bug I noticed that the
> constructor for the 'DirEntry' class was deliberately being left
> undocumented and that there
> was no clear way to manually create a DirEntry object from a path. I
> brought up my objections
> to this decision in the bug tracker and was asked to have the discussion
> over here on
> python-ideas.
>
> I have a bunch of functions that operate on DirEntry objects, typically
> doing some sort of filtering
> to select the paths I actually want to process. The overwhelming majority
> of the time these functions
> are going to be operating on DirEntry objects produced by the scandir
> function, but there are some
> cases where the user will be supplying the path themselves (for example,
> the root of a directory tree
> to process). In my current code base that uses the scandir package I just
> wrap these paths in a
> 'GenericDirEntry' object and then pass them through the filter functions
> the same as any results
> coming from the scandir function.
>
> With the decision to not expose any method in the stdlib to manually
> create a DirEntry object, I am
> stuck with no good options.  The least bad option I guess would be to copy
> the GenericDirEntry code
> out of the scandir package into my own code base.  This seems rather
> silly.  I really don't understand
> the rationale for not giving users a way to create these objects
> themselves, and I haven't actually seen
> that explained anywhere. I guess people are unhappy with the overlap
> between pathlib.Path objects
> and DirEntry objects and this is a misguided attempt to prod people into
> using pathlib. I think a better
> approach is to document the differences between DirEntry and pathlib.Path
> objects and encourage
> users to default to using pathlib.Path unless they have good reasons for
> using DirEntry.
>
> Thanks,
> Brendan
>
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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