Expose IPFS paths/URLs into Python

[Mec-iS]

I don't know how/if it can be useful, but on python-dev there is a PEP proposal to establish a uniform protocol to treat filesystem's path:

1. https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2016-May/144506.html
2. https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2016-May/144569.html

[ntninja]

Thank for your feedback! Unfortunately you commented during a time when there was nobody with commit rights watching this project, hence the lack of response. Please see the more recent comments on #1 for an idea about the current status of this project.

I think what you linked to ended up been the __fspath__ property of pathlib.Path objects and others. In the scope of py-ipfs this would likely be only useful for allowing things like f = open(some_ipfs_file_obj) and only if the IPFS directories were FUSE-mounted first. Most important this does not add any kind of VFS layer to python: You still end up with string paths that are then passed to the operating system using the usual open-class of system calls. The closes we have in Python would probably be urllib.request.urlopen with which we can and should integrate in due time (even if it has somewhat fallen out of favour compared to requests and aiohttp which can only do HTTP(S)).