survey: is shelve broken? should it be fixed?

[Jeff Shannon]

In article <mailman.1020781012.22833.python-list at python.org>, 
Roman Suzi says...
> On Tue, 7 May 2002, Alex Martelli wrote:
> 
> > Right.  We really cannot afford to change semantics wantonly, even though
> > it may seem the old one was 'broken', it WAS around for years, so clearly
> > some applications might well have relied on it.
> 
> Are there really applications (but very simple) which survive 1.5.2 -> 2.x
> leap? In my experience always some little modification is needed to bring
> them up-to-date with current python version.

Well, I can't speak for 1.5.2 => 2.x, but I've had a number of 
scripts that I wrote for 2.0, that run completely unchanged under 
2.2.1, and it'd be nice if they continue to run under 2.3 and 
2.4.  Of course, none of them use shelve, so this particular fix 
wouldn't bite *me*  ;)  ...but I would imagine that if I *did* 
use shelve, I'd have coded around the current behavior.  Changing 
that behavior could have unpredictable results.  I like the idea 
of adding a warning and an optional switch, with the default 
changing in a couple of versions.  (But I *do* want a warning to 
let me know that I'm doing something wrong, or at least 
questionable, before having it suddenly change.)

-- 

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International