[ZODB-Dev] OID length

[Shane Hathaway]

Tim Peters wrote:
> Some "auxiliary" code would definitely break if they weren't strings.  For
> example, ZEO cache tracing has its own trace-file format, which originally
> blew up left and right when Shane tried to use it with APE.  That got
> generalized (and, alas, the trace files got bigger) to live with APE's (at
> the time) variable-length string oids, but was not generalized to live with
> non-string oids.

FWIW: Ape still uses variable length strings.  The OIDs shrank in size 
because they used to contain the object's "physical path", but that 
turned out to play bad tricks with copy/paste, so now OIDs are usually 
ASCII representations of integers.

Also, Ape assigns its own OID for the root object; '\0' * 8 is not a 
special OID in Ape.  It can do this because it has to provide its own DB 
and Connection objects anyway.

Shane