[Boost-users] Stability of serialization across boost versions

Subject: [Boost-users] Stability of serialization across boost versions
From: Jeff Abrahamson (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-05-16 04:20:42

A program I wrote using the Boost serialization library trips up when
communicating with instances of itself on hosts with different versions of
the library.

terminate called after throwing an instance of
'boost::archive::archive_exception'
  what():  unsupported version

It's not reasonable to require that users of my software upgrade their
hosts in lock step with each other, all at once or not at all.  But library
skew on the order of a bit over two years at least (consider users of
Ubuntu LTS) arises naturally and quite often.  I think the solution would
be for boost serialize to offer an API point that says "write with binary
protocol n", which leaves the library free to read with any protocol it
knows.  When I feel that n+1 has existed for long enough, I can tell my
program to use n+1.  Unfortunately, and I'd like to be shown wrong, I don't
think the library provides such an API point.

Any feedback or suggestions other than not using boost for serialization?

Jeff Abrahamson

http://jeff.purple.com/
http://blog.purple.com/jeff/