[M3devel] Pickles, TextLiterals, and word size

[Rodney M. Bates]

There is what I would call a bug in TextLiteral.i3 whose effect is that a
TextLiteral.T has a different fingerprint on 32- and 64-bit machines.
So you can't pickle a Text literal on one word-sized machine and unpickle
it on the other.

But fixing this will have the effect of invalidating any existing pickles
written on a 64-bit machine before the fix, so they can't be read after
the fix, even on a 64-bit machine.  They would have to be rewritten after
the fix.

Is anybody doing the latter?  Would having to recreate your pickles be a
problem?  Apparently, nobody is going cross-word-size, or we'd have heard
about it.

I would like to fix it properly, but don't want to undermine anybody's
working system.