bot.db.get_channel_value(chan, key, False) is returning a string instead of a bool

[myano]

Description

If you have data in the default database and you try to pull it out using:

bot.db.get_channel_value(chan, key, False)

The docs say, https://sopel.chat/docs/package/db.html#sopel.db.SopelDB.get_channel_value

"default – value to return if key does not have a value set (optional)"

If you put in False as the third parameter, I'd expect a bool to be returned, but rather it is a string of "False"

Relevant code snippets:

• sopel/sopel/db.py

  Line 826 in 86c73db

  return _deserialize(result)

• sopel/sopel/db.py

  Line 48 in 86c73db

  value = str(value)

Thank you for taking a look. I love what Sopel as become!

Reproduction steps

1. bot.db.set_channel_value("##test", "blah")
2. bot.db.get_channel_value("##test", "blah", False)

Expected behavior

I expect to get a type of bool of False rather than a string of "False"

Relevant logs

Notes

No response

Sopel version

8.0.2

Installation method

pip install

Python version

3.11.2

Operating system

Debian 12

IRCd

Libera.Chat

Relevant plugins

custom plugin

[dgw]

I haven't assigned a milestone yet, because it's not immediately clear to me what the best approach is.

Clearly this is a Bug, and should be fixed, so it's natural to toss it in a hypothetical 8.0.3 maintenance release. But, as far as I can infer from git blame, this has been the behavior since defaults were introduced in 2019 (#1673, first released with version 7.0.0).

Is there enough of a Spacebar Heating risk to this that it's worth doing some fancy shenanigans with emitting a warning if the default value changes when deserialized before finally "fixing" the bug in, say, 9.0?

Obviously it's easier to just fix it in 8.0.3 or 8.1.0. It's just that this bug has definitely been around long enough to be "load bearing".