Re: [pcre-dev] Serialization format versioning

On Fri, 2018 Jun 22 15:35+0100, ph10@??? wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Jun 2018, Zoltán Herczeg wrote:
>
> > well, this is much more ambitious than what we have now (or what we
> > have ever planned :) ). Anyway doing this is definitely possible,
> > but far from beaing a trivial amount of work. Finding resources to
> > do it is probably the challenge here.
>
> Indeed. I see the usefulness, but it's not a project that I want to
> take on.

I can understand that. But I would point out that PCRE2's current notion
of serialization is quite limited compared to what that word usually
implies (cf. Java, .NET object serialization), so this is not likely to
be the only time that an application developer finds the functionality
does not meet their needs.

I would ask for this, then: The pcre2serialize doc currently mentions
"The host on which the patterns are reloaded must be running the same
version of PCRE2..." but this information isn't stated very prominently.
As "serialization" usually implies a format that is forward-compatible
(and often portable across architectures as well, given that a typical
use case of serialization is to send objects over a network), I think it
would be helpful to set off this caveat under its own section header. I
would also add the point that the serialization produced is meant for
short-term use only, as any point upgrade of PCRE2 can/will invalidate
existing serializations and such upgrades can occur at any time.


--Daniel


--
Daniel Richard G. || skunk@???
My ASCII-art .sig got a bad case of Times New Roman.