RE: Pb. of backward compatibility ?

From: Canal, Philippe (pcanal@fnal.gov)
Date: Thu Mar 09 2000 - 21:19:22 MET


Hi,

Actually, the situation is going to be better from v2.23/12.  Starting from this
version all the ROOT object are taking advantage of the byte count facility.  This
means that any file produced by a release later than v2.23/12 will be readeable
by v2.23/12, achieving forward compatibility (at last).

Rutger is correct in pointing out that the addition of the StreamerInfo facility
provokes Laurent's difficulty.  However this should be a problem ONLY for the
TNtuple, the TTree should not be affected by this problem (this is because the
StreamerInfo is append to the TTree::streamer which is __contained__ inside the
TNtuple streamer).

So if you do need file created by v2.23/12 or above readable by older root, stick
with straight TTrees.

Cheers,

Philippe

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-roottalk@pcroot.cern.ch
[mailto:owner-roottalk@pcroot.cern.ch]On Behalf Of Rutger van der Eijk
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2000 6:36 AM
To: ROOT mailing list
Subject: Pb. of backward compatibility ?


Hi Laurent,

The thing you want is forward compatibility, i.e. read with a older
version the output of a newer version. This is almost never the
case for software.

I expect the in v2.23/12 added 'StreamerInfo facility' to cause the
problems => i.e. the format of the files changed => no forward
compatibilty. You therefore have to move all your platforms/users to
latest version (or forget about newest)

Cheers,

Rutger



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