[Mailman-Developers] Patch: Optionally Suppressing List Headers

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 10:17:07PM -0400, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
>     JRA> Ah.  The problem comes from the fact that the exported
>     JRA> marshals won't have the new data.  Perhaps python needs to
>     JRA> evaluate something else for it's marshalling file format?
> 
>     JRA> XML?  Hmmmm??
> 
> I'm not sure how that would help -- you still have to update the file
> to have the new data.  Sure, you could do it in a text editor, but no
> one will! :)

Because then, at least old unchanged objects which were read in by the
'code inside the object' wouldn't break: they'd just have to pick up
the default for that attribute.  When you wrote them *back out*,
they'd automagically be fixed.

> Marshals, BTW, exist primarily to support caching of compiled byte
> code.  A .pyc file is a marshal with a little bit of header
> information.  They also happen to be an efficient way to store and
> load simple Python objects.  Pickles are better for more complex
> objects (e.g. instances, or cyclic data structures).

Are pickles less prone to break the "objectization" of objects you're
going to want persistent storage of?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink
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