I'm puzzled by Dulcinea's use of PersistentList and PersistentMapping.

I remember testing a long time ago, and deciding that these classes do NOT
do on-demand loading of data (as the *BTree and *Set classes do) and so
are not meant to be used for storing large lists and mappings.  They're
just there to provide convenient replacements for small lists and dicts,
to avoid having to set ._p_changed every time you mutate them, right?

If that's true, though, I don't understand why Dulcinea uses them in
several places where it seems you'd want loading-on-demand (for example,
persistent_list.py, user_database.py).  Is it simply that Dulcinea doesn't
care about large numbers of users or large specified_lists?  Or am I wrong
about the on-demand behaviour of Persistent{List,Mapping}?

Thanks for any help


John