Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Libferris for Fedora 14

Long story short, I decided to update to F14 on the desktop to get easy access to qt4.7 for a project. During that update I rebuilt libferris (of course) and noticed a not so subtle bug in boost 1.44 that comes with f14. See my filed bug 694448 for full details, but basically it stops boost::serialization from reading binary boost archives from files generated with f13's boost. To get around this, the build of ferris includes some more smarts in fallback to the backup text archive.

Lucky for me, in the old days I wanted to copy some *boost files to the maemo platform, and not being 64bit on the target binary archives are not expected to work, so I already had libferris writing plain text too when updates were made. So on f14 things continue to work, and 1.5.4 of libferris onward have more graceful automatic fallbacks for cases where the binary archive fails when it really shouldn't.

You might see this bug if you use semantic smush sets, etagere (tagging), and a few other libferris features with ferris 1.5.3 or less and move to a boost in the 1.42-1.44 range.

Given that F15 should be out soonish, and it seems it will come with boost 1.46, I'm not sure backporting boost::serialization fixes is really on anyone's top ten.

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