[Boost-users] portable binary archive major bugfix

From: Pfligersdorffer, Christian (Christian.Pfligersdorffer_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-04-28 09:21:22

Hello everybody,

if you're using or evaluating my portable binary archives be sure to get
version 2.0 from the boost vault
(http://www.boost-consulting.com/vault/)! (Remeber it only works with
boost 1.33 and 1.34.)

Version 1.x contained a serious bug that effectively transformed most of
negative integral values into positive values! For example the two
numbers -12 and 234 were stored in the same 8-bit pattern and later
always restored to 234. This was fixed in this version in a way that
does not change the interpretation of existing archives that happend to
work because there were no negative numbers - as is unfortunately the
case in our application or the bug would have surfaced long ago. 

Archives created by version 2.0 and containing negative numbers will
raise an integer type size exception when reading it with version 1.x.
Thanks to Markus Frohnmaier for testing the archives and finding the
bug.

PS @ Robert Ramey: Your portable binary example also suffers from this
bug. In fact I felt free to copy it from you ;-) Ah, I see now that you
fixed it in version 1.35. Didn't think you'd bother to since you wanted
to remove it completely...

Regards,

--
Christian Pfligersdorffer
Software Engineering
http://www.eos.info