On 3/19/07, Robert Ramey <ramey@rrsd.com> wrote:
Zach Laine wrote:
Well, this went a little off-topic, but I still would like to know why Robert thinks that adding aliases is a bad idea. It seems to me that my mistake is a pretty likely one in the long term, and so the Serialization library needs to provide a way to recover from such mistakes, or reduce the chances of their introduction altogether (by removing BOOST_CLASS_EXPORT()). At the very least, if BOOST_CLASS_EXPORT() is to stay, an explicit note regarding this pitfall should be added to the docs. Again, I am happy to write a patch for the code and/or docs.
My first reaction is that its a bad idea. But I'm open to having my mind changed. What I'm concerned about is the possibility that adding such a feature would ripple down into the library making it (even) more complex, harder to maintain, perhaps hurting performance, etc. just to address a case which shouldn't have occurred in the first place. So why don't we proceed as follows:
a) make the changes you need to make to address your current problem. b) When we get a look at the changes, we can decide whether they're simple and don't complicate the library or whether it starts a whole chain reaction.
Fair enough. I'll have a patch ready soon and post it to the list. Unless I hear otherwise, I'll work against version 1.33.1.
More interesting to me would be a way to somehow trap this situation before it gets to this point. Something like:
An automatic serialization regression tester.
[snip] This sounds like a great idea to me. Zach Laine