[Python-Dev] Dropping bytes "support" in json

[Bob Ippolito]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 1:05 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
>>> I can understand that you don't want to spend much time on it. How
>>> about removing it from 3.1? We could re-add it when long-term support
>>> becomes more likely.
>>
>> I'm speechless.
>
> It seems that my statement has surprised you, so let me explain:
>
> I think we should refrain from making design decisions (such as
> API decisions) without Bob's explicit consent, unless we assign
> a new maintainer for the simplejson module (perhaps just for the
> 3k branch, which perhaps would be a fork from Bob's code).
>
> Antoine suggests that Bob did not comment on the issues at hand,
> therefore, we should not proceed with the proposed design. Since
> the 3.1 release is only a few weeks ahead, we have the choice of
> either shipping with the broken version that is currently in the
> 3k branch, or drop the module from the 3k branch. I believe our
> users are better served by not having to waste time with a module
> that doesn't quite work, or may change.

Most of my time to spend on json/simplejson and these mailing list
discussions is on weekends, I try not to bother with it when I'm busy
doing Actual Work unless there is a bug or some other issue that needs
more immediate attention. I also wasn't aware that I was expected to
comment on those issues. I'm CC'ed on the discussion for issue4136 but
I don't see any unanswered questions directed at me.

I have the issues (issue5723, issue4136) starred in my gmail and I
planned to look at it more closely later, hopefully on Friday or
Saturday.

As far as Python 3 goes, I honestly have not yet familiarized myself
with the changes to the IO infrastructure and what the new idioms are.
At this time, I can't make any educated decisions with regard to how
it should be done because I don't know exactly how bytes are supposed
to work and what the common idioms are for other libraries in the
stdlib that do similar things. Until I figure that out, someone else
is better off making decisions about the Python 3 version. My guess is
that it should work the same way as it does in Python 2.x: take bytes
or unicode input in loads (which means encoding is still relevant). I
also think the output of dumps should also be bytes, since it is a
serialization, but I am not sure how other libraries do this in Python
3 because one could argue that it is also text. If other libraries
that do text/text encodings (e.g. binascii, mimelib, ...) use str for
input and output instead of bytes then maybe Antoine's changes are the
right solution and I just don't know better because I'm not up to
speed with how people write Python 3 code.

I'll do my best to find some time to look into Python 3 more closely
soon, but thus far I have not been very motivated to do so because
Python 3 isn't useful for us at work and twiddling syntax isn't a very
interesting problem for me to solve.

-bob