stdlib's shutil improvements

I have contributed a small feature to shutil in the past, and in my work on distutils I used it really intensively. So I took over its maintenance a while ago.

I had some feedback from the community that shutil shouldn't be used, because of some negative comments like this one in copytree: "consider this example code rather than the ultimate tool". Well guess what ? I removed that comment because this is a darn lie ! ;) . copytree() for instance, is really powerful and avoid you to write yet-another-os-walk loop. Use it.

The only limitation of shutil APIs are related to the fact that it's unable to copy all the file metadata when you move/copy files around. Those are too specific to each platform and it's impossible/very hard to come up with a portable metadata reader/writer.

But for most needs you have in your Python applications, shutil is perfect. Have a look at tools like Distribute or zc.buildout, they are using shutil all over the place.

Besides a few bug fixes I did, here's a list of major features I have added or I am currently working on, with their Python version availability:
- make_archive(): this function will let you create any kind of archive, given a tree of files. You can create tarballs, zip files, or anything you want as long as you register a function that knows how to create one. See the doc for more details. (Python 2.7)

  • unpack_archive(): this function will let you unpack any kind of archive. It has a registery like make_archive(). It's almost ready but too late for 2.7 inclusion. (Python 3.2)
  • copytree(): Two new options for this one (see doc). (Python 3.2)
  • copy_function: allows you to provide your own copy function. Used by copytree() it wants to copy a file.
    • ignore_dangling_symlinks: if copytree() encounter a dangling symlink, and symlinks is set to False, it will ignore it and not raise an error anymore.

shutil groups all high-level files operations, that's why I have added new functions to work with archives.

If you have any feature suggestion, any file operation function that you think should be included there, please let me know !