[Mailman-Developers] Re: Why both a .msg and .db in qfiles?

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "JCL" == J C Lawrence <claw@kanga.nu> writes:

    >> For something as simple as a dictionary (which the metadata
    >> is), I believe so.  I did some benchmarking quite a while back,
    >> but don't remember the details.  Note though that marshals are
    >> easier to break in odd ways -- they're basically a tool too
    >> support .pycs so were never terribly robust.  Pickles generally
    >> better for object trees too, especially if you might have
    >> cycles.  OTOH, binary fast pickles for simple data structures
    >> might perform equally well.

    JCL> Points briefly at Jelly and Banana:

    JCL>   http://twistedmatrix.com/products/spread

    JCL> I've been pleased with the performance curves of both in
    JCL> early testing here.

Interesting stuff.  I've known about Twisted for a while but hadn't
realized they had those serialization protocols.  I can see how that'd
be useful for some distributed computing applications, especially when
you're accepting hostile data.

In Mailman's case, I think pickles and marshals are probably fine.
They have the advantage that they're built-in tools, and we don't have
to worry about hostile data (in this context).

But thanks for the reference.  I've had conversations with the Twisted
guys at previous IPCs about Mailman and SMTP plugins.
-Barry