[Zope-dev] FTP interface being worked on?

[R. David Murray]

On Sun, 18 Mar 2001, Chris McDonough wrote:
> "Potentially lossy" also doesn't mean "leaky".  It just
> means that folks who expose their objects to this sort of
> serialization can choose their own format, and if it
> represents the object adequately for their own use in both
> directions, it's good enough.
> 
> If you want a lossless "morally binary" representation, it's
> probably best to use XML export, which is great for your
> purposes, because it already exists!  ;-)

So you are saying that the reconstructed object must be functionally
identical, but may or may not be bytewise identical when reconstructed
from the serialization.

For round trip editing, this seems reasonble.  For CVS, not getting
a lossless result could result in spurrious diffs.  Somehow, though,
I don't think this will be a problem in practice, and we can ensure
that it won't be by requiring that a read of the reconstructed
object produce a bytewise identical serialization to the one which
was used to build the reconstructed object.  This is likely to be
the case in any reasonable serialization implementation, and so as
I said should not be a problem in practice.

--RDM