Re: [boost] [serialization] New version number in 1.34

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-19 12:31:47

Joaquín Mª López Muñoz wrote:
> how hard would
> it be to provide a 1.33.1 compatibility mode to cope with these
> situations and so facilitate users' upgrade from 1.33.1 to 1.34?

I did a quick grep through my current code and found something
interesting.

It turns out that "get_library_version" is only used in a couple of
places.

And what's more, they are in pairs (except for the one in optional.hpp).
This fact is amazing to me.  I suggests to me that I was depending on
symetry to avoid using more that 30% of my available brain power.

So that suggests to me that all one would have to do is to augment
the library flags used at construction - (with an alternate constructor
to avoid breaking interface) to permit specification of a previous
archive version - right now its a constant built in at compile time.

So, I'll consider this for 1.35.

One potential "gotcha".  Certain types have version numbers
(different that the serialization library version number).  So to
generate backwards compatibility for those types, more
machinery would have to be generated.  That might be handled
with a custome VERSION macro and augmentation of
the serialization of those types.

Good Luck with this.

Robert Ramey