How to help (Unix) programmers: silently omit data under certaincircumstances. From the Python 3000 release notes :

Note that when os.listdir() returns a list of strings, filenamesthat cannot be decoded properly are omitted rather than raising UnicodeError .

(Background: in Python 3k, os.listdir() is normally called with adirectory name that is a str Unicode object.)

Yes, os.listdir() had problems , butthis is not a solution; this is making

One of the problems with Python's current approach to CPAN-like packagesis, to put it in a particularly blunt way, that it hasn't quite sunk inthat not everyone has root.

(I am aware that Python doesn't have an approach to packages as such;it's all done by distutils et al, although distutils is part of thestandard library. That's part of the overall problem.)

Oh, sure, you can use distutils to install packages in places besides

Dear software, I have a small and simple request, from a working systemadministrator:

Please stop pretending that \r\n and \n are the same thing.

That is, please stop pretending that MS-DOS line endings and Unix lineendings are the same thing, because they are not. Pretending that theyare is one of those collective hallucinations that only work if absolutely everyone is playing along. Sooner or later(usually sooner) you will run into a program that does not play along,and things