[Ecls-list] Question #2

[Matthew Mondor]

On Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:25:24 +0100
Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll <juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> wrote:

> I have been asked to make FASL files incompatible between releases -- or
> even between commits if we follow Question #1 in previous email --. That
> means if a FASL is created with a given version, such as 10.2.1.124, a later
> version of ECL, say 10.2.1.125 should refuse to load the file.
> 
> How many of you would find this problematic?

If older FASLs under a new revision are already considered risky to
load, then I also don't mind about a signal or at least a warning when
loading FASLs from another revision.  I guess that there could be a
number of reasons for this, including changes to C structure sizes and
the like.

Also, keeping the shared library and modules around for an older
version would still allow standalone executables built against an older
ECL to run fine.  An admin could also carefully run concurrent ECL
versions using RPATH at linking time without much issues, to be able to
run a set of old existing FASLs with an older ECL.  Perhaps something
which could help then would be to provide very easy identification of
the ECL version a FASL was built with...
-- 
Matt