This issue tracker has been migrated to GitHub, and is currently read-only.
For more information, see the GitHub FAQs in the Python's Developer Guide.

Author tanzer@swing.co.at
Recipients alexandre.vassalotti, belopolsky, bronger, eddygeek, gregory.p.smith, pitrou, serhiy.storchaka, tanzer@swing.co.at, tim.peters
Date 2018-12-09.10:33:01
SpamBayes Score -1.0
Marked as misclassified Yes
Message-id <E1gVwOS-0005rj-FU@swing.co.at>
In-reply-to Your message of "Fri, 07 Dec 2018 17:22:36 +0000" <1544203356.31.0.788709270274.issue22005@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
Content
Paul Ganssle wrote at Fri, 07 Dec 2018 17:22:36 +0000:

> > Gregory P. Smith (gregory.p.smith) 2017-03-02 18:57
> > TL;DR - Just one more example of why nobody should *ever* use pickle
> > under any circumstances.  It is useless for data that is not transient
> > for consumption by the same exact versions of all software that
> > created it.
>
> This *is* something that users can work around by not abusing pickle
> in this way and instead using a proper cross-platform serialization
> format. I realize that that makes it *more difficult* for some people
> to do so, but as Gregory points out, these people are doing dangerous
> stuff that will break in a way that we are not going to be willing or
> able to fix at some point *anyway*.

This is completely and utterly wrong, to put it mildly.

The official documentation of the pickle module states (I checked 2.7
and 3.7):

    The pickle serialization format is guaranteed to be backwards
    compatible across Python releases.

Considering that this issue is 4.5 years old, one would assume that the
pickle documentation would have been changed in the meantime if
Gregory's and Paul's view matched reality.

But my or your personal views about the usability of pickle don't
matter anyway. There are too many libraries and applications that have
been using pickle for many years.

I personally know about this kind of usage in applications since 1998.
In that particular case, the pickled information resides on machines
owned by the customers of the applications and **must** be readable by
any new version of the application no matter how old the file
containing the pickle is. Rewriting history by some Python developers
is not going to impress the companies involved!

Have a nice day!
History
Date User Action Args
2018-12-09 10:33:02tanzer@swing.co.atsetrecipients: + tanzer@swing.co.at, tim.peters, gregory.p.smith, belopolsky, pitrou, bronger, alexandre.vassalotti, serhiy.storchaka, eddygeek
2018-12-09 10:33:02tanzer@swing.co.atlinkissue22005 messages
2018-12-09 10:33:01tanzer@swing.co.atcreate