TENSORPACK_SERIALIZE (#746)

CHANGES.md

@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ Here are a list of things that were changed, starting from an early version.
 TensorFlow itself also changed APIs before 1.0 and those are not listed here.
 
 + [2018/04/05] msgpack is replaced by pyarrow. If you want compatibility with old serialized data,
-	manually uninstall pyarrow, and msgpack will be used as a fallback.
+	`export TENSORPACK_SERIALIZE=msgpack`.
 + [2018/03/20] `ModelDesc` starts to use simplified interfaces:
 	+ `_get_inputs()` renamed to `inputs()` and returns `tf.placeholder`s.
 	+ `build_graph(self, tensor1, tensor2)` returns the cost tensor directly.

examples/A3C-Gym/simulator.py

@@ -87,7 +87,7 @@ class SimulatorProcessStateExchange(SimulatorProcessBase):
             c2s_socket.send(dumps(
                 (self.identity, state, reward, isOver)),
                 copy=False)
-            action = loads(s2c_socket.recv(copy=False).bytes)
+            action = loads(s2c_socket.recv(copy=False))
             state, reward, isOver, _ = player.step(action)
             if isOver:
                 state = player.reset()
@@ -144,7 +144,7 @@ class SimulatorMaster(threading.Thread):
         self.clients = defaultdict(self.ClientState)
         try:
             while True:
-                msg = loads(self.c2s_socket.recv(copy=False).bytes)
+                msg = loads(self.c2s_socket.recv(copy=False))
                 ident, state, reward, isOver = msg
                 client = self.clients[ident]
                 if client.ident is None:

tensorpack/utils/serialize.py

@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@
 # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
 # File: serialize.py
 
+import os
 from .develop import create_dummy_func
 
 __all__ = ['loads', 'dumps']
@@ -61,7 +62,7 @@ except ImportError:
     dumps_msgpack = create_dummy_func(  # noqa
         'dumps_msgpack', ['msgpack', 'msgpack_numpy'])
 
-if pa is None:
+if pa is None or os.environ.get('TENSORPACK_SERIALIZE', None) == 'msgpack':
     loads = loads_msgpack
     dumps = dumps_msgpack
 else: