Re: [boost] [serialization] Support for multiple class name strings

From: troy d. straszheim (troy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-03-19 12:59:27

On Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 08:51:12AM -0800, Robert Ramey wrote:
> Zach Laine wrote:
> > Well, this went a little off-topic, but I still would like to know why
> > Robert thinks that adding aliases is a bad idea.  It seems to me that
> > my mistake is a pretty likely one in the long term, and so the
> > Serialization library needs to provide a way to recover from such
> > mistakes, or reduce the chances of their introduction altogether (by
> > removing BOOST_CLASS_EXPORT()).  At the very least, if
> > BOOST_CLASS_EXPORT() is to stay, an explicit note regarding this
> > pitfall should be added to the docs.  Again, I am happy to write a
> > patch for the code and/or docs.
> 
> My first reaction is that its a bad idea.  But I'm open to having my
> mind changed.  What I'm concerned about is the possibility that
> adding such a feature would ripple down into the library making
> it (even) more complex, harder to maintain, perhaps hurting
> performance, etc. just to address a case which shouldn't
> have occurred in the first place.  So why don't we proceed
> as follows:
> 
> a) make the changes you need to make to address your
> current problem.
> b) When we get a look at the changes, we can decide
> whether they're simple and don't complicate the library
> or whether it starts a whole chain reaction.

I'm watching with interest too, we also have too much data (~5T and
counting) to reprocess.  In addition to the namespace-change
situation, if has come up that two developers registered the same
class under different typedeffed names... I'll have to dig around to
recreate that one and supply all the details.

-t