`PackagePath` does not support Windows paths

Open Beginner friendly

#528 opened on Nov 17, 2025 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty: 2/5
Estimated time: 1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness: 75/100

Issue type: Bug
Clarity: Clearly specified
Activity status: Quiet
Tech stack: python
Domain: tooling

Research direction

Start in importlib_metadata/init.py around the referenced PackagePath implementation and compare its handling of forward- and backslash-separated paths with the RECORD specification. Add coverage for Windows-style paths and verify that the resulting .name is consistent across path separators.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Currently, importlib.metadata.files assumes that path are Unix-style with forward slashes, while the spec allows Windows-style backwards slashes too. This causes e.g. the .name on items to be inconsistent between platforms (https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/14446).

https://github.com/python/importlib_metadata/blob/95ecf2aa573a68d4624506f801ca70992a337f41/importlib_metadata/__init__.py#L371

From https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/recording-installed-packages/#the-record-file

The path may be either absolute, or relative to the directory containing the .dist-info directory (commonly, the site-packages directory). On Windows, directories may be separated either by forward- or backslashes (/ or ).

Ref https://github.com/python/importlib_metadata/issues/51

Dominant language: Python
Stars: 142
Forks: 97
PR merge metrics: No merged PRs in 30d

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