[Haskell-cafe] How to avoid keeping old data formats in your code?

[Evan Laforge]

I haven't heard of anything like that, it sounds too complicated for me.
You still need to convert the old format to the new one, so it seems like
you still need a bit of code for each version, which needs access to both
old and new.
On Dec 21, 2014 9:10 AM, "Corentin Dupont" <corentin.dupont at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Dec 21, 2014 at 1:50 AM, Evan Laforge <qdunkan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Dec 20, 2014 at 3:29 AM, Corentin Dupont
>> <corentin.dupont at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> > I didn't had so much luck with this question. The question was:
>> > -> "How to avoid keeping old data formats in your code?"
>> > Indeed those old data formats are often needed for retro-compatibility
>> with
>> > previous versions of your software.
>> >
>> > Say you have a data structure that is serialized in a file, and then
>> you add
>> > a field in a later version. You are obliged to keep both versions of the
>> > data structure if you want to be able to read both versions of the file.
>> > Potentially, if you update very often your structure between releases,
>> you
>> > are obliged to keep N versions of the data structure in your code.
>> > See the exemple at: http://acid-state.seize.it/safecopy
>>
>> I just keep both versions.  It doesn't seem like too much hassle.  I
>> move the old version to the Serialize module so modules that aren't
>> concerned with serialization aren't cluttered.
>>
>> In the fully general case, I think there's no way around it.  But if
>> you are just adding a field, or or changing a field to a super-type
>> (e.g. 'a' becomes 'Maybe a') then you can trivially upgrade in place
>> in the deserialization code.  Or you can use something like protobufs,
>> which supports that kind of thing automatically.
>>
>
> What I'm thinking about is to put in the Setup.hs  some code that will
> extract from GIT the older versions of the data structure. This way you are
> able to keep only the last version of it in the HEAD, and still be able to
> build migration code.
> Do you know of any such custom build?
>
>
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