Switch file paths to pathlib.Path?

[epage]

Good

• pathlib is nice to work with

Bad

• Didn't exist or was provisional until Python 3.6
  • The pypi version might be compatible enough as a backport?

[epage]

This is the more correct backport: https://pypi.org/project/pathlib2/

[epage]

For input parameters, it looks like this could be done without breaking compatibility and keeping python2 support.

• Change the type-annotations to os.PathLike
• Create a fallback implementation of either fsdecode or fsencode (whichever is needed by the XNET C API)
• Call this on the parameter passed in to convert the PathLike to str/bytes.

Are there any path out params? That is where some more care would be needed.