bytes vs. characters [LWN.net]

bytes vs. characters

Posted Apr 23, 2015 22:40 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: bytes vs. characters by lopgok
Parent article: Report from the Python Language Summit

> Mission critical means the mission fails when the program fails to read files in a directory.

And the question was: what kind of mission relies on filename garbage?

It's not 100% clear if you actually care about the filenames, or not and just their content.

BTW I totally agree that silently skipping broken filenames is a massive bug.

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bytes vs. characters

Posted Apr 24, 2015 0:44 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> And the question was: what kind of mission relies on filename garbage?
For example, a cloud storage client that is used to backup users' files.

bytes vs. characters

Posted May 9, 2015 21:36 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

That would be a backup program written by someone who doesn't understand the difference between Python's byte- and string-based interfaces. I wouldn't trust any backup program written by someone who didn't understand that! God only knows what it's doing to the file content...