I've written before about sysadmin style use of version control , where we typically use a VCS for documenting the livetree instead of developing something. Recently I ran into a mistake that modern VCSes and this style of working combinetogether to enable: deleting a file from the live directory tree butforgetting to delete it from the VCS.

Since the live tree is, well, live, deleting the file actually takeseffect and so you don't notice anything wrong. In fact, in a sensenothing is wrong

On the surface, the struct module looks like the right answerif you need to handle a binary protocol .In practice it is not the right answer, or at least it isn't thecomplete answer, because it has some weaknesses and limitations. Theissues are primarily but not entirely in the area of decoding binarymessages as opposed to creating them ('deserialization' versus'serialization').

Note that I am not blaming the struct module for this. Itsdocumentation is very straightforward about what it's