Mogul (was Re: RELEASE on March, 1st !!!)

[Kevin Glynn]

Denys Duchier writes:
 > Kevin Glynn <glynn at info.ucl.ac.be> writes:
 > 
 > > I assume that it would be difficult to build a library that ozmake can
 > > use to read either old style or new style? The old style would be
 > > deprecated so we don't need to maintain this for ever.
 > 
 > this requires access to the old unmarshaler, which, as things stand,
 > can only be achieved with access to a 1.2.5 installation.  As far as I
 > know, the marshaler cannot easily be factored out and exported as a
 > stand-alone lib.
 > 

In an earlier message in this thread Denys wrote:

    >    Kevin also pointed out that currently the MOGUL web interface does
    >    not support multiple "platforms" - after the release packages will
    >    have to be updated (can that be done automatically?) and everyone
    >    will have to use the new [1.3.0] version. I do care for QTK in
    >    particular (since it's in the book).
    
    I am glad you raise this issue because that is also very much worrying
    me.  It's a really stupid situation because I don't think there are
    any packages in MOGUL that distribute pre-compiled functors.  This
    means that the current pickles only use the very plain and simple data
    part of the pickle format, which I don't think changed when the pickle
    format last changed.


If (all?) the packages are actually plain and simple data, and if this
part of the pickle format hasn't changed then isn't the simplest
solution to provide a (secret) loadTerm interface for use by ozmake
that ignores the version number?

I have tried disabling the version check and successfuly installed a
few of the mogul packages with a 1.3.0 installation.  We can
"manually" try all the package files to see if they extract
successfully. 

Maybe I've just been lucky.... 

k