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

[Brett Cannon]

On 6/20/07, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> 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.

That's fine since I don't want to fix it.  =)  So kick this out to
python-dev then?

And speaking of struni, when I realized that fixing _bsddb.c was not
going to be simple, I moved on to the next test (test_asynchat) and
came across a string with an 's' prefix.  Just to make sure I got
everything straight, str8 produces a classic str instance (pure ASCII)
and a string with an 's' prefix is a str8 string.  Other there any
other differences to be aware of when working on the branch?

And I assume the PyString API is going away, so when working on a
module one should just tear out use of the API and convert it over to
PyUnicode, correct?  And do the same for "s" format characters in
Py_BuildValue and PyArg_ParseTuple?

I just want to get an idea of the basic process going on to do the
conversion so that I don't have to figure out the hard way.

-Brett