Marshal Obj is String or Binary?

[Steve Holden]

Theoretical? not really Steve. I wanted to use django's wonderful db
framework to save a structure into my postgresql. Except there is no
direct BLOB support for it yet. There, I was trying to explore my
options with saving this structure in clear text.

Right, NOW I understand.

regards
Steve

 

[Paul Rubin]

Correct. I didn't quite see the issue as assembly vs. python, having
direct translation to programming hours.... I figured the day I
upgrade my python, I would write a python script to upgrade the
data. I take my word back.

Writing that script sounds potentially capable of consuming some
programming hours. If the marshal format changes, it might not be
easy to have the old and new marshal modules in the same Python
instance. You might need two separate interpreters (old and new), to
demarshal your objects in the old interpreter and communicate them
somehow to the new interpreter (e.g. through pickle and sockets) for
re-marshalling. Migrating a database is a big pain in the neck
already without such extra complication.