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The messagepack history started in days when unicode, string, and bytes (or binary data types) were not distingushed in Python. All string data was packed as string - and also unpacked. This changed with Python2 which introduced Unicode - marked as u"Unicode string". (The default string remained unmarked or possibly marked as bytes "default string"=b"default string".) Python3 then switched its default string directly to Unicode. ("Unicode string"=u"Unicode string". Bytes remained marked as b"bytes string") To solve this, two logical parametres were introduced to messagepack - one for packer and the other one for unpacker: * use_bin_type - packer - default before 1.0: `False` - default after 1.0: `True` - when set, the packer distinguish between unicode(raw) and bytes(bin) - when unset, the packer doesnt distinguish between unicode and bytes and packs everything as internal "raw" * raw - unpacker - default before 1.0: `True` - default after 1.0: `False` - when set, the unpacker doesnt respect internal data types and transforms everything either to bytes when `use_bin_type` is set or to unicode when it is not set - when unset, the unpacker respects internal data types and transforms "internal bin" to bytest and "internal raw" to unicode Default values before 1.0 were set to be compatible with old versions that threats everything as "raw" (ASCII) string. So everything was packed as "raw" (nothing as "bin") and everythong unpacked as (Unicode) string. Default values after 1.0 ensure that everything is unpacked as the same type as it was packed. The stable version is 0.6.0 right now. Here is a compatibility list of previous versions: * Version 0.6.0 - compatible - needs catching of `Value Error` in `parse_msg` * Version 0.5.6 - compatible * Version 0.5.5 - compatible * Version 0.5.4 - compatible * Version 0.5.3 - compatible - deprecated (uses some deprecated internals) * Version 0.5.2 - compatible - deprecated (uses some deprecated internals) * Version 0.5.1 - incompatible - unknown keyword "raw" in unpack(raw=...)
