Version 2.1.6! New custom serializer. #11
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Bugfix: the hashed_ballots_tiebreaker assumed that marshal.dumps produced an identical bytes string given identical inputs. This is not true! We also apparently can't rely on pickle.dumps to be deterministic. So, starvote now has its own bespoke--and completely deterministic--simple binary serializer, called starvote_custom_serializer. It's tailor-made for the needs of starvote and isn't useful for anybody else. But it does guarantee that hashed_ballots_tiebreaker will now produce identical results across all supported Python versions, across all architectures, regardless of optimization level. Thanks to Petr Viktorin for the bug report! Fixes #10.
Thanks, Petr!
Added starvote_custom_deserializer, which allows us to test that starvote_custom_serializer is working correctly. (Not that it matters--it just needs to produce *something* that's approximately unique-ish for these ballots. But now we know for certain!)
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I went ahead and wrote a custom deserializer to match my custom serializer. Now we can be reasonably certain that the custom serializer is working as intended, thank goodness! |
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My pedantic jib¹⁾ remains, as this bit of README is out of date:
The serializer demands strings. ¹⁾ (a word I looked up but still don't quite get) |
Raise exceptions if they aren't, and test those exceptions too. Holding steady at 100% coverage.
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"the cut of your jib" is an old-timey expression meaning "your general style / demeanor". The only way you ever hear it is the sentence "I like the cut of your jib!", which means "I like your style!" (I don't understand the literal phrase, it sounds like you're saying you like how they styled one particular sail on their ship.)
Good point! I'll mention that. Hopefully that's a restriction folks can live with. I believe the rest of the API is still sufficiently agnostic that any hashable value will work. You're only restricted to candidates being strings if you use the |
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Ah! Silly me, looking up individual words in an English phrase. I should know better than to do that :) LGTM. |
larryhastings
deleted the
add_custom_serializer_for_hashed_ballot_tiebreaker
branch
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Thanks, Petr! I appreciate all your smart feedback. |
Bugfix: the hashed_ballots_tiebreaker assumed
that marshal.dumps produced an identical bytes
string given identical inputs. This is not true!
We also apparently can't rely on pickle.dumps
to be deterministic. So, starvote now has
its own bespoke--and completely deterministic--simple binary serializer, called starvote_custom_serializer. It's tailor-made for the needs of starvote and
isn't useful for anybody else. But it does guarantee that hashed_ballots_tiebreaker will now produce
identical results across all supported Python
versions, across all architectures, regardless of
optimization level.
Thanks to Petr Viktorin for the bug report! Fixes #10.