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About new function vs. new argument: this could be asked on python-dev (or on the core-mentorship list if you prefer an environment guaranteed friendly). If you look at copy and copy2, you’ll see that adding a function was chosen, but the names are not helpful at all. In more recent shutil development, arguments like copy_function and ignore (on copytree) were added to let people customize behavior without rewriting all the function logic. Guido van Rossum has a rule about not adding an argument when the value is always a constant, preferring another function instead, but I’m not sure I remember it clearly, so asking for other developers’ thoughts would be good.