> 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. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
