"timo" == <timo@timo-tasi.org> writes:
timo> Right now, the shortcut 'Cookie.Cookie()' returns an timo> instance of the SmartCookie, which uses Pickle. Most extant timo> examples of using the Cookie module use this shortcut. timo> We could change 'Cookie.Cookie()' to return an instance of timo> SimpleCookie, which does not use Pickle. Unfortunately, timo> this may break existing code (like Mailman), but there is a timo> lot of code out there that it won't break. Not any more! Around the Mailman 2.0beta5 time frame, I completely revamped Mailman's cookie stuff because lots of people were having problems. One of the things I suspected was that the binary data in cookies was giving some browsers headaches. So I took great pains to make sure that Mailman only passed in carefully crafted string data, avoiding Cookie.py's pickle stuff. I use marshal in the application code, and I go further to `hexlify' the marshaled data (see binascii.hexlify() in Python 2.0). That way, I'm further guaranteed that the cookie data will consist only of characters in the set [0-9A-F], and I don't need to quote the data (which was another source of browser incompatibility). I don't think I've seen any cookie problems reported from people using Mailman 2.0b5. [Side note: I also changed Mailman to use session cookies by default, but that probably had no effect on the problems.] [Side side note: I also had to patch Morsel.OutputString() in my copy of Cookie.py because there was a test for falseness that should have been a test for the empty string explicitly. Otherwise this fails: c['foo']['max-age'] = 0 but this succeeds c['foo']['max-age'] = "0" Don't know if that's relevant for Tim's current version.] timo> Also, people could still use the SmartCookie and timo> SerialCookie classes, but not they would be more likely to timo> read them in the documentation because they are "outside the timo> beaten path". My vote would be to get rid of SmartCookie and SerialCookie and stay with simple string cookie data only. Applications can do fancier stuff on their own if they want. -Barry