Shane Hathaway wrote: > Hanno Schlichting wrote: >> Shane Hathaway wrote: >>> In addition to making the data format pluggable, the patch puts most of >>> ZODB's dependencies on the cPickle module in one place, so now if we >>> decide to improve our usage of the cPickle module, we can make that >>> change in one place rather than several. >> I'm wondering if this would be a good opportunity to include a version >> marker in addition to the protocol format to the API's? > > Maybe. Starting with pickle protocol version 2, pickles do start with a > version header.
Reading pickles is backwards compatible. But specifying the version in which to write pickles needs explicit configuration. >> The ZODB still uses version one of the pickle protocol throughout and so >> far it has been complicated and cumbersome to change this in any way. > > Is it cumbersome? I tried changing to pickle protocol v2 while making > this patch. Without this patch it was cumbersome, as the number of places to change the pickle version was many. Now it probably has become a lot easier ;) > Only 4 of the 3000+ ZODB tests failed. One of them failed > because we have some pickle introspection code that does not yet > understand protocol 2; that should be easy to fix. Another failed > because it seems to depend on the exact length of a generated pickle, > which is a bit silly. I didn't look at the rest of the test failures > because I assume they are all similarly superficial. That sounds easy to fix. >> While the documentation of Protocol Buffers mention that they try to be >> stable and avoid incompatible versions, I don't trust any standard to be >> so generic that it can avoid incompatible changes over a period of many >> years. > > The patch I made might cover this. After this patch, ZODB will look for > the serializer format name in curly braces at the beginning of each > serialized object. That format name could include a version number if > necessary. Right. I was wondering if it would be a good idea to build this in from the start. My impression is that every data format of any kind of non-trivial complexity will have multiple incompatible versions of the same spec at some point. Maybe it is YAGNI as the formats themselves have a version mechanism in them, though. Hanno _______________________________________________ For more information about ZODB, see the ZODB Wiki: http://www.zope.org/Wikis/ZODB/ ZODB-Dev mailing list - ZODB-Dev@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zodb-dev
