On 09/16/09 10:49, David Magda wrote:
On Wed, September 16, 2009 11:53, Lori Alt wrote:
So we're considering a refinement of the current policy of not
guaranteeing future readability of streams generated by earlier version
of ZFS. The time may have come where we know enough about how send
streams fit into overall ZFS versioning that we can make them more
useful by making a stronger assurance about future readability. So stay
tuned.
Is there any versioning in the stream format (like the on-disk ZFS format)?
Yes, there is versioning, but it hasn't been used much so far. That's
what we intend to use going forward to allow future versions of the code
to interpret older versions of the format.
The tar/pax and TIFF file formats seem to be fairly good at having a base
level, and have added extra functionality over the years (decades?). Older
software ignores the fields it doesn't understand, but still gets at most
things.
I guess there's a balance between giving a guarantee and boxing yourself
in unnecessarily.
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