Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/8] Initial support for Python 3

From: John Keeping <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2013 12:34:04 +0000

On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 12:41:30AM +0000, John Keeping wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 06:43:04PM -0500, Pete Wyckoff wrote:
>> Can you give me some hints about the byte/unicode string issues
>> in git-p4.py?  There's really only one place that does:
>> 
>>     p4 = subprocess.Popen("p4 -G ...")
>>     marshal.load(p4.stdout)
>> 
>> If that's the only issue, this might not be too paniful.
> 
> The problem is that what gets loaded there is a dictionary (encoded by
> p4) that maps byte strings to byte strings, so all of the accesses to
> that dictionary need to either:
> 
>    1) explicitly call encode() on a string constant
> or 2) use a byte string constant with a "b" prefix
> 
> Or we could re-write the dictionary once, which handles the keys... but
> some of the values are also used as strings and we can't handle that as
> a one-off conversion since in other places we really do want the byte
> string (think content of binary files).
> 
> Basically a thorough audit of all access to variables that come from p4
> would be needed, with explicit decode()s for authors, dates, etc.

Having thought about this a bit more, another possibility would be to
apply this transformation once using something like this (completely
untested, I haven't looked up the keys of interest):

-- >8 --

def _noop(s):
    return s

def _decode(s):
    return s.decode('utf-8')

CONVERSION_MAP = {
    'user': _decode,
    'data': _decode
}

d = marshal.load(p4.stdout)
retval = {}
for k, v in d.items():
    key = k.decode('utf-8')
    retval[key] = CONVERSION_MAP.get(key, _noop)(v)
return retval

-- 8< --

Obviously this isn't ideal but without p4 gaining a Python 3 output mode
I suspect this would be the best we could do.

John