[Python-3000] How best to handle failing tests in struni?

[Guido van Rossum]

On 6/20/07, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> > So, my question is how best to handle this test (and thus other tests
> > like it).  Should it just continue to fail until someone fixes
> > _bsddb.c to accept Unicode keys (and thus start up a FAILING file
> > listing the various tests that are failing and doc which ones are
> > expected to fail until something specific changes)?  Or do we silence
> > the failure by making the constants pass through str8?  Or should str8
> > not even be used at all since (I assume) it won't survive the merge
> > back into p3yk?
>
> This goes back to the text-vs-binary debate. I _think_ bsddb inherently
> operates on binary data, i.e. neither keys nor values need to be text
> in some sense.
>
> So the most natural way would be to make it accept binary data only on
> input, and always produce binary data on output. Any *usage* that
> expect to be able to pass in strings is broken.

OTOH, pragmatically, people will generally use text strings for db keys.

I'm not sure how to decide this; perhaps we need to take it public.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)