A few documentation questions about path and seperator

Hi all, I have a few questions about the current implementations:

1. I noticed there is a sep attribute in AbstractFileSystem. But all built-in implementations use /, even for LocalFileSystem on windows, right?
2. Should paths passed into fs.xxx have protocols? For example, I saw some implementations calls _strip_protocol for paths, and some don’t (for example, other methods in ArrowFsWrapper calls it, but not for ls see arrow.py and #1086). Should they be consistent? If they should, we need to fix current implementations and document this change somewhere.

[martindurant]

Correct, sep is always “/”. Originally, we had os.sep for the local filesystem, but found this unworkable, so the attribute is just a hangover and not useful. I don’t think it’s referenced anywhere.

Seconds, filesystems should normally call _strip_protocol and allow full URLs passed in. You are welcome to make a PR to HDFS to make sure this works there too.

[martindurant]

should we also state in the document that methods like ls or touch in fs should also accept url

Yes, and probably this belongs in AbstractFileSystem’s docstrings