[RFC] Repository.get_file_texts API and planning for it

[Aaron Bentley]

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John Arbash Meinel wrote:
>> Iterables of bytes is a very convenient one.  Text lines is nice only
>> when working with text.  File objects have high API demands, but even
>> strings are iterables of bytes.
> 
> You've said this in the past, and while I agree it is convenient, it has
> some odd performance characteristics. Specifically (edited for clarity):

I've no doubt it does.

> So while I agree that iterable of bytes is a convenient and very
> adaptable api. We really don't want to be passing a plain string to that
> api.

It is very convenient for test cases, though.

So we can
1. recommend wrapping strings in lists (or maybe tuples-- how fast are
they?)
2. automatically wrap strings in lists/tuples as an optimization.

But I should say that passing in a single string to create_file suggests
that you're not being memory-efficient, because you must have read a
whole file into memory.

So there are other reasons than writelines performance to avoid this in
real code.

Aaron
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