This looks fine to me (note: I'm just some guy, not a core dev)

I'd argue that we're adding two ways to do the same thing (exists(follow_symlinks=False) and lexists()), where the former is more explicit, and so the addition of lexists() is unnecessary.

@barneygale You're right that .lexists() just wraps .exists(follow_symlinks=True). I put it in to have the same symmetry as with .chmod()/.lchmod() and .stat()/.lstat(). If we'd rather have both methods without parameters, I guess the implementation could be moved to a protected method and .exists() become a wrapper like .lexists() but if it's all the same I'd leave it as it is.

Resolving conflicts.

The difference is that lchmod and lstat are bona fide system calls, whereas lexists isn't.

I think you mean that they are standard library calls, neither have been syscalls in a long while (at least on Linux). My motivation, however, wasn't to make people coming from a POSIX-compliant C library "feel at home", but old fogies like me who're used to the os.path API. Anyway, some tests are failing, so there's work for me to do.

I'm still -1 on this, per Zen of Python's "There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it."

I'd rather we didn't have lstat() or lchmod() either, for the record :)

I'm still -1 on this, per Zen of Python's "There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it."

I'd rather we didn't have lstat() or lchmod() either, for the record :)

Ah, I misinterpreted your "This looks fine to me" earlier comment :)

In that case, let's close this. There seems to have been little interest in the issue or the PR in the four-and-a-half years since the issue was opened, and the bar for additions to the stdlib is (quite rightly) high.

Thanks for the PR @nphilipp -- I hope this doesn't discourage you from contributing to CPython in the future!