RFC: Python3 porting question

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Tue, 2018-03-13 at 17:59 +0000, Noel Power via samba-technical
wrote:
> Previously I posted a patch for python3 port for the smb module. During
> some real life testing I came across an issue. I'd like to get some
> input on how to address this.
> 
> pysmb has amongst others the methods loadfile & savefile
> 
> both take and return strings as per the documentation in the module itself
> 
>         "loadfile(path) -> file contents as a string"
>         "savefile(path, str) Write string str to file."
> 
> of course in python2 this api works fine, byte content is adequately
> received and returned regardless of whether the content really is string
> or not. In other words binary content is handled fine with iiuc the
> exception of embedded NULLs when passing a string to the savefile method.
> 
> In python3 with the stricter string class the default behaviour is to
> try and return strings (decoded from the byte content as utf8) and this
> doesn't work well when dealing with data that cannot be decoded (similar
> limitation when writing to a file). Reading/writing only bytes that can
> be encoded/decoded as utf8 seems rather limiting
> 
> we could
> 1) Change the api for 'smb' for python3 so that loadfile & savefile deal
> with bytes only. This of course has some implications for client code if
> it wants to be python2/python3 compatible.

This is the correct answer.

> 2) Change the api for savefile to allow strings or bytes to be accepted
> and allow loadfile to fallback to returning bytes if it fails to decode
> a string value.
> 
> My preference is for 1 (because it is cleaner and unambiguous)

In this case I agree.

> I think regardless of above we should change the python2 'savefile' to
> accept 's#' instead of 's' when parsing the arguments as currently the
> api is not symetrical in that you can read content that you cannot write.

This seems reasonable.

Andrew Bartlett
-- 
Andrew Bartlett                       http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team  http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT          http://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba