On 9/30/19 3:56 PM, Barry Scott wrote:
On 30 Sep 2019, at 16:49, Dan Sommers
<2qdxy4rzwzuui...@potatochowder.com
<mailto:2qdxy4rzwzuui...@potatochowder.com>> wrote:
In the totality of a Path object that claims to represent paths
to files,
It represents string that *should* in most cases work in the APIs
that work on files. Not the same idea.
I'm not sure the documentation supports your view. Components
of paths are strings, but IMO the Path object represents a file.
including the arguably troublesome read_bytes and
write_bytes methods, and a rename method, however, it's not
unreasonable expect the object to track *itself* when I use *its*
own rename method (backwards compatibility restraints
notwithstanding).
"the object" did track the changes its just that "the object" is not
the Path object, it's in the operating system and/or the file system.
For the rename it's the directory that the name is recorded in.
So which is it? Does the Path object represent a string, the
name of a file (whether that file exists or not), or the file
itself? A moment ago, you claimed that a Path object represents
a string that should work in the APIs that work on files. Now,
you're claiming that the Path object is a proxy for something in
the filesystem. I don't mean to be combative or confrontational,
but I think that this fuzziness/inconsistency is at or near the
root of the differing expectations.
There was an interest talk at this years PYCON UK about the
the errors that people new to python make. Misunderstand syntax
is about 1/3 of the problems, but 2/3 was having the wrong model.
This discussion seems to fall into the "wrong model" world that
leads to a expectation failure.
On this (that there's something about the model of Path objects
that leads to expectation failures) we agree. :-)
Have we moved on to how we can improve the situation?
Absolutely.
Documenting the fact that calling rename on a Path object does
not update that object, and at least an acknowledgement of the
backwards compatibility issues, would be a good start. Does the
same sort of thing happen with Path.chmod as well?
Clarifying what a Path object represents is also in order. Again,
I note that the top of https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html
talks about filesystem paths, but a lot of the method descriptions
(e.g., rename) use the phrase "this file," as if Path objects
represent (or are actually proxies for) actual files or an actual
filesystem.
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