[Python-Dev] FileCookieJars

[Terry Reedy]

On 3/10/2013 4:59 PM, R. David Murray wrote:

> To be clear, just passing the stdlib tests is *not* sufficient to think
> that backward compatibility is not likely to be broken.  Deciding about
> the likelihood of breakage is a hard problem, to which we generally
> employ gut-level heuristics :) (And code search, as Steven suggests).
>
> Since you say that it will "obviously" break backward compatibility, I'd
> say that if we are going to do anything we'd have to think about how best
> to introduce a more sane implementation and deprecate the old...and if we
> are going to do that, we probably ought to spend a bit of time seeing if
> there are any other open cookiejar issues we can tackle at the same time.

A) For similar reasons, I consider the proposal a first draft, and 
probably not the exact right thing to do.
B) I have had similar thoughts about taking a broader look. Searching 
open issues for cookie gets 24 hits and I think at least half are about 
cookie.py or cookiejar.py.

> If, that is, you are interested enough to continue to be the point person
> for this, which probably won't be a short process :)
>
> The problem here is getting people interested, apparently :(

The number of relatively recent problem reports indicates that people 
are using the two modules, so fixing them is worthwhile in that sense.

On the other no, it does not seem that any *current* developers are 
working with cookies.

Messages on http://bugs.python.org/issue17340 suggest that cookie.py 
should be based on http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6265
I added you as nosy to get your opinion.

> Since I start my Pycon diversion-from-work next week, maybe I can find
> some time to take at least a preliminary look.

I am willing to learn and help, but my only experience with them is as a 
browser user defending against the onslaught of cookies. (I once sped up 
IExplorer by deleting a massive cookie cache.)

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy