WIP snapshot (git stash, 2026-07-11): ongoing work with paths — preserved before branch cleanup

[thorwhalen]

Status: unattended assessment — a git stash snapshot, not a reviewed feature branch

This branch's own commit title is WIP on master: 07f7885 ... on going work with paths (preserved stash) — it's a git stash push that got pushed to origin as an archival snapshot, not authored as a PR. It has no open PR, no linked issue, and pre-dates the current master by roughly two months (dol/paths.py was 1143-2265 lines then vs. now).

What it contains

Mostly mechanical black-style reformatting of dol/paths.py (single→double quotes, trailing-comma wrapping) mixed with a few genuinely new pieces: split_if_str, separate_keys_with_separator, path_filter, and _return_none_if_none_input — this last one has a malformed docstring (the closing paren of an example block appears with no opening """, so the function body follows what reads as broken/truncated text). This is not close to landable as-is.

Why I'm not landing it

dol has many dependents across the fleet — a behavior change here needs verification against all of them, and this diff isn't even internally consistent (the _return_none_if_none_input docstring is broken). It also predates ~2 months of independent evolution on dol/paths.py.

What would make it clearly landable or droppable

Someone with context on "ongoing work with paths" reviews whether path_filter / separate_keys_with_separator / split_if_str are still wanted given how far paths.py has moved since, fixes the broken docstring, and reformats to match current style rather than 2-months-stale black output.

Closing immediately after opening — this PR exists only so the branch tip is recoverable from refs/pull/<N>/head after the remote branch is deleted (git-hygiene cleanup of long-idle unlanded branches; dol#stash-cleanup).

[thorwhalen]

Closing to preserve the ref (refs/pull/102/head) while cleaning up a long-idle stashed-WIP remote branch. See PR body for the full assessment.