[Python-Dev] email package status in 3.X

[P.J. Eby]

At 04:04 PM 6/21/2010 -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>On Jun 21, 2010, at 01:24 PM, P.J. Eby wrote:
>
> >OTOH, one potential problem with having the encoding on the bytes object
> >rather than the ebytes object is that then you can't easily take 
> bytes from a
> >socket and then say what encoding they are, without interfering with the
> >sockets API (or whatever other place you get the bytes from).
>
>Unless the default was the "I don't know" marker and you were able to set it
>after you've done whatever kind of application-level calculation you needed to
>do.

True, but making it a separate type with a required encoding gets rid 
of the magical "I don't know" - the "I don't know" encoding is just a 
plain old bytes object.

(In principle, you could then drop *all* the stringlike methods from 
plain-old-bytes objects.  If it's really text-in-bytes you want, you 
should use an ebytes with the encoding specified.)