Re: [Boost-users] [serialization] portable serialization archive

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-06-05 15:04:01

Peter Dimov wrote:
> Frank Birbacher:
>> Robert Ramey schrieb:
>>> If someone really want's to make portable_binary_archive an
>>> "officially supported archive".  Then some way of testing is
>>> required.  This would require generating output on one platform and
>>> reading on another.  This is
>>> something that I couldn't figure out how to make BJAM do.
>>
>> Well, you could just instead check whether the produced output is the
>> same everywhere. I thought of calculating the md5 sum and checking
>> against that. That would make a good unit test. Or am I missing
>> something?
>
> (possibly embedded in the test source).

Damn - another good idea.  This would resolve the problem I had before when
I tried this which was related to maintaining other files, etc.  Its not 
clear how
easy this would work for binary files.

Its clear that it would be a good thing to add to test a group of files 
serialized with
every version of  boost so that one could include tests for backward 
compatibility
automatically.  However, looks like a fair bit of effort to setup - but 
still - would
be very useful.

Robert Ramey