[Python-Dev] [ 654866 ] pickle and cPickle not equivalent

[Martin v. Löwis]

"Patrick K. O'Brien" <pobrien@orbtech.com> writes:

> > I hear such statements quite often recently, but I'm not impressed.
> 
> You don't hear statements like that from me. And impressing people on 
> this list wasn't my goal. So I'm at a complete loss as to what I've 
> done to deserve this kind of response from you.

Your original message sounded much like a support question. I was
trying to say (perhaps in impolite words, for which I apologize) that
posting support requests is not appropriate for this mailing list.

> And you don't think my asking for some help on this list is better use 
> of two people's time? One who has an example that fails, and one who 
> knows the cPickle implementation well enough to help track down the 
> cause of failure.

Valuing one person's time against the time of another person is always
a difficult issue - unless one person pays the other for the time.

> It is with cPickle. And I'm concerned about just walking away from this 
> because I think it is a serious problem for anyone who wants to 
> correctly unpickle objects that were pickled using cPickle.

And it is a good thing that you have submitted a bug report to
sourceforge.

> Sure. And this is the first time I've seen cPickle do the wrong thing. 
> Considering that the app that found this bug is an example of a banking 
> app that logs account transactions as pickles, I think you might 
> appreciate that it would be a good thing if those pickles maintained 
> proper references to those accounts and could restore transactions 
> appropriately, rather than creating new account instances that weren't 
> part of the bank.

I certainly agree that it is desirable to fix this bug, just like it
is desirable to fix all the other bugs.

> And what harm did I do by asking if anyone had time to help, rather than 
> letting this issue drop? Sorry if this isn't the kind of response you 
> expected back from me. But I'm already irritated with the amount of 
> time I've spent on this. Your reply really rubbed me the wrong way. If 
> I didn't care about Python I sure as hell wouldn't be spending my time 
> tracking this problem down.

It was the (perceived) attitude "my bug report is more important than
the other 320 open bug reports" that rubbed me the wrong way. I do
appreciate that you took the time to report the bug. 

This is all volunteer's time: users voluntarily take the time to
report bugs, Python developers voluntarily take the time to
investigate and fix them. The perceived seriousness of a problem is
but one factor for a contributor to determine whether to work on
the problem.

Regards,
Martin