Robert Ramey writes:

David Raulo wrote:

...

- this is not mentionned anywhere in the documentation or in the API. - you have at least one user who lost backward archive compatibility because of this.

See below a patch against svn. Can we please discuss its advantages and drawbacks? - what good does it do: obviously in my case, restore backward compatibility.

Why can't you just patch your own copy?

From a comedic standpoint I think that's a good answer.

...

- it gives more flexibility to the versioning scheme. Two usefull such schemes were described previously in the discussion, where classes still have increasing integer versions, but are not possible with 8 bits storage.

- what downsides does appying this patch have? Maybe occuring a slight overhead on 16-bits platforms? If true, can this be actually measured? - Would this patch cause any regression? Break any user code which was working fine before? Break user archive backward compatibilty?

Would this not break compatibility with binary_?archive ? Currently binary archive stores the version as a 16 bit integer. Maybe it wouldn't but it's another thing that would have to be considered. Even if it didn't, this would break the "guarentee" that any serialization which works for one archive class is guarenteed to work with any other one.

I've wondered if Robert deliberately misspells guarantee in order to emphasize that there is no guarantee. -- Brian Wood Ebenezer Enterprises http://www.webEbenezer.net (651) 251-9384