Re: Backward compatibility of next beta

[Frank Crawford]

Derek,

On Tue, 2020-02-04 at 12:56 -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Hi Frank,
> 
> Frank Crawford <
> address@hidden
> > writes:
> 

...
> According to the docs I just found on class pickle.Pickler[0], there
> is
> a fix_imports and Protocol version number in there that lets you set
> the
> compatibility level:
> 
>     The optional protocol argument, an integer, tells the pickler to
> use
>     the given protocol; supported protocols are 0 to
>     HIGHEST_PROTOCOL. If not specified, the default is
>     DEFAULT_PROTOCOL. If a negative number is specified,
>     HIGHEST_PROTOCOL is selected.
> 
>     If fix_imports is true and protocol is less than 3, pickle will
> try
>     to map the new Python 3 names to the old module names used in
> Python
>     2, so that the pickle data stream is readable with Python 2.
> 
> SO..  It SHOULD be possible to create a pickle in Py3 that is
> readable
> by Py2.  Have we tried this?

Unfortunately, no, it doesn't work the way it reads.  It maps some
pickle built-in name to new versions of those names, but doesn't
address the translation of ascii to unicode and visa-versa (except for
those specific instances).

I did try this.

Certainly, if you could get the translation to work, you would need to
use protocol version and that is a general thing that should be looked
at in the future, but as a performance issue, not a conversion option.

> -derek
> 
> [0] 
> https://docs.python.org/3/library/pickle.html#pickle.Pickler
> 
>