Re: [Boost-users] Stability of serialization across boost versions

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Stability of serialization across boost versions
From: John Maddock (boost.regex_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-05-18 04:34:04

> 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?

It was my understanding that stuff like that should be supported, if you 
have a test case then filing a bug report would seem to be in order?

John.