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Date: Fri, 15 May 2015 11:53:05 +1000
Subject: Re: Survey -- Move To Trash function in Python?
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:90637

On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 11:37 AM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Fri, 15 May 2015 01:49 am, Grant Edwards wrote:
>
>> On 2015-05-14, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I'd like to do a little survey, and get a quick show of hands.
>>>
>>> How many people have written GUI or text-based applications or
>>> scripts where a "Move file to trash" function would be useful?
>>
>> How would you even define what "move to trash" means in a standard
>> way?
>
> There are standard locations for the trash on Linux, Windows and OS X.
>
> I presume that there are standard locations on the other main OSes, such as
> Android, iOS, any Unix which supports the Free Desktop Standard(?), etc.
> Anything else can either remain unsupported, or can use a caller-defined
> location.
>

Point to note: Inclusion in the Python standard library would cement
its *API*, but not its OS and desktop support. A call like
trash.retrieve("oops_i_deleted_this") will either succeed or raise an
error; it can change from raising to succeeding for a given platform
without breaking anyone's code. So it wouldn't be a problem to start
out supporting only the most major platforms (or not even all of
them), and expand later.

Much as I detest the operation itself, I do think this is something
worth papering over. The multiprocessing module papers over a whole
lot of platform quirks, and all we have left is "make sure your main
module is importable if you use this on Windows"; a trashing module
could deal with all the differing ways of trashing things, and leave
us with "trashing may not work on certain file systems". (Though when
it comes to the bikeshedding phase, I'm sure there'll be some who say
"if it can't be trashed, just hard delete it", and others who say "if
it can't be trashed, raise an exception". And neither is truly wrong.)

ChrisA