Many of the differences between the cPickle module and
the pickle module appear undocumented, despite a claim
in the cPickle module that the pickle docs explain the
differences.

For example, I just found that cPickle.Pickler() can be
called without a file argument, which makes it use an
internal list to store the pickled data; and that in
that case it has a method getvalue() that returns the
contents of that list as a string; and that its dump()
method takes a second argument which, if true, calls
the getvalue() method.  Who knows what else it supports.

Someone should go over the cPickle source and compare
the API *carefully* with the documented pickle API.

Logged In: YES 
user_id=3066

Unassigning myself; clearly, I've not had time for this.

Is this still desired? If so, I have fairly long list of differences
that I could document. Or maybe, I could backport the _pickle module to
Python 2.6, which doesn't have as many differences.

+1 to backporting _pickle as cPickle. Do bring it up on python-dev.

No need for gratuitous breakage of cPickle in Python 2.6.

Alexandre, if you can add the list of changes to the documentation, that
would be great.

2.6 should keep the original cPickle, warts and all, for backwards
compatibility.  I'd be okay though with also having _pickle there --
just don't call in cPickle (and don't import it from pickle.py either).

I've just closed issue8738 as invalid and surely a document explaining the differences between cPickle and _pickle would save me a lot of effort.  It will also help anyone porting from 2.x to 3.x.

Alexandre, do you have any notes that you can share?