[Python-Dev] Is XML serialization output guaranteed to be bytewise identical forever? (original) (raw)

Serhiy Storchaka storchaka at gmail.com
Tue Mar 19 04:13:00 EDT 2019

19.03.19 00:41, Raymond Hettinger пише:

3) Add a standards compliant canonicalization tool (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CanonicalXML ). This is likely to be the right-way-to-do-it but takes time and energy.

4) Fix the tests in the third-party modules to be more focused on their actual test objectives, the semantics of the generated XML rather than the exact serialization. This option would seem like the right-thing-to-do but it isn't trivial because the entire premise of the existing test is invalid. For every case, we'll actually have to think through what the test objective really is.

I think the combination of options 3 and 4 is the right thing. Not always the stable output is needed, in these cases option 4 should be considered. But there are valid use cases for the stable output, in these cases we need to provide an alternative in the stdlib. I am working on this.

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