> it's a social one of how to get all the library authors on a language to agree on a convention of how to handle encoding.
Ok, but the solution isn't to make everyone rewrite their libraries by holding the future ransom if they do not.
It could have been real simple: let python track encoding when it's known and throw an exception if they mix oldstr(unknown) with newstr(py3).
In py3 modules newstr is str, and in py2 modules oldstr is str. Now you only have to fix the bits where they mix and the programmer can always choose to fix it in the new code.
Ok, but the solution isn't to make everyone rewrite their libraries by holding the future ransom if they do not.
It could have been real simple: let python track encoding when it's known and throw an exception if they mix oldstr(unknown) with newstr(py3).
In py3 modules newstr is str, and in py2 modules oldstr is str. Now you only have to fix the bits where they mix and the programmer can always choose to fix it in the new code.