On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 10:15 PM, Paul DeBruicker <pdebruic@gmail.com> wrote:

Is there a strong reason to switch to 1.8 vs 1.7 other than the fact that 1.8 is the new hotness?
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I remember that you made no guarantees but are Fuel 1.7 and Fuel 1.8 serialized formats compatible?

Indeed, they are� not compatible. In fact, I guess all Fuel versions will be like that. It is really difficult not to change the format at all.
So...is it worth to update to 1.8?� it depends on your needs. 1.8 provides new features (hooks) and some better performance.

- If you already have only a few data and it would be easy to migrate then I would do it.
- If it is too much data, then I would stay in 1.7 until you really need something from 1.8.
- If you need something of the new features/hooks of 1.8 or the speed is crucial, then I would update to 1.8.
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If not is there a recommended process to switch from one format to the other?

I'd assume starting from a clean pharo you could:
� � � �1. load Fuel 1.7
� � � �2. materialize all the interesting Fuel 1.7 objects
� � � �3. removing Fuel 1.7
� � � �4. load Fuel 1.8
� � � �5. serialize all the interesting objects in Fuel 1.8

Exactly. Unfortunately, that's the only way we have to do it. Of course you can script that so it is not really a lot of "development time" but just the machine running ;)

I have not looked at the code but is there a way to do a streaming 'serialize to byte array' in conjunction with Zinc for populating a database?

Sorry, I couldn't follow here. All I can say is that you can pass to Fuel any stream (even Zinc ones). So you can do:
FLSerializer newDefault serialize: 'whatever' on: aZincWriteStream
you may need to implement some extension methods to Zinc streams. I think Nick already did them. If it is helpful, we can create a package Fuel-Zinc that adds such extension methods, just as we did for FuelFileSystem.
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Thanks for your work on this.