[Zope-dev] Bad Marshal Data

[Josiah Carlson]

Hey guys,

I believe the "Bad Marshal Data" exception is the result of incompatible 
marshal libraries encoding and decoding pyc and pyo files.  I only 
started having this problem myself earlier today.

I had been using a shared copy of python 2.0 (shared across multiple 
machines) and it was working fine.  After being informed of local 
versions on each of the machines (I am finishing work on a parallel 
processing library for Python, and was spawning scripts on multiple 
machines), I switched to using those.  Unfortunately, two of the 
machines have python 2.1.1 installed on them, causing intermittent "bad 
marshal data" exceptions (which depended on network/processor load).

To finish the story, after switching back to the shared copy of python, 
there were no problems.  As well, using only those machines with python 
2.0 installed works just fine.

Do your best to only have a single version of python installed at any 
one time, you'll potentially save yourself some nail biting.

Thanks,
  - Josiah Carlson