[infinispan-dev] Keeping formats compatible

Too many paralell discussions in this email thread… changing title… On Jul 11, 2013, at 12:14 PM, Sanne Grinovero <sanne(a)infinispan.org&gt; wrote: Hold on till we've figured out the cause… and if you're a rigt, a potential fix could be investigated to make 5.3.0 and 5.3.1 compatible... When we started investigating rolling upgrades we played with the idea of having a serialized format that's readable between different versions and we created [1]. I actually created some branches to investigate the feasibility of adding such tests: [2, 3, 4, 5, 6], and of course found incompatibilities. This idea was abandoned and instead we decided on a Hot Rod based mechanism to transfer the data from one cluster to the other. Such tests could be added, but there needs to be a limit on how far we want to be backwards compatible with. IOW, trying for Infinispan 5.3 to be backwards compatible with 4.0 would be a lot of work. The minimum req would possibly be that we're backwards compatible between minors. This is something we can try to start imposing from 6.0 onwards. It's a good moment to start doing it, at the beginning of a major release. [1] https://issues.jboss.org/browse/ISPN-2034 [2] https://github.com/galderz/infinispan/tree/archive/t_2034_40x [3] https://github.com/galderz/infinispan/tree/archive/t_2034_41x [4] https://github.com/galderz/infinispan/tree/archive/t_2034_42x [5] https://github.com/galderz/infinispan/tree/archive/t_2034_50x [6] https://github.com/galderz/infinispan/tree/archive/t_2034_51x -- Galder Zamarreño galder(a)redhat.com twitter.com/galderz Project Lead, Escalante http://escalante.io Engineer, Infinispan http://infinispan.org