Re: [Python-ideas] Add more information in the header of pyc files

On 11 April 2018 at 02:54, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

On Tue, 10 Apr 2018 19:29:18 +0300 Serhiy Storchaka wrote:

...

A bugfix release can fix bugs in bytecode generation. See for example issue27286. [1] The part of issue33041 backported to 3.7 and 3.6 is an other example. [2] There were other examples of compatible changing the bytecode. Without bumping the magic number these fixes can just not have any effect if existing pyc files were generated by older compilers. But bumping the magic number in a bugfix release can lead to rebuilding every pyc file (even unaffected by the fix) in distributives.

Sure, but I don't think rebuilding every pyc file is a significant problem. It's certainly less error-prone than cherry-picking which files need rebuilding.

And we need to handle the old bytecode format in the eval loop anyway, or else we'd be breaking compatibility with bytecode-only files, as well as introducing a significant performance regression for non-writable bytecode caches (if we were to ignore them). It's a subtle enough problem that I think the `compileall --force` option is a safer way of handling it, even if it regenerates some pyc files that could have been kept. For the "stable file signature" aspect, does that need to be specifically the first *four* bytes? One of the benefits of PEP 552 leaving those four bytes alone is that it meant that a lot of magic number checking code didn't need to change. If the stable marker could be placed later (e.g. after the PEP 552 header), then we'd similarly have the benefit that code checking the PEP 552 headers wouldn't need to change, at the expense of folks having to read 20 bytes to see the new signature byte (which shouldn't be a problem, given that file defaults to reading up to 1 MiB from files it is trying to identify). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia