Re: problematic installation leads to errors

[Michael van Acken <acken@vanacken.do.uunet.de>]

> Date: Sun, 16 May 1999 22:10:47 +0200
> From: Marco Oetken <Marco.Oetken@informatik.uni-oldenburg.de>
> 
>   It is obviously not clear what I wanted to say with the original
> mail: I know why there have been errors, now. But I think that the
> error messages from the compiler (and oob) were not helpful. The
> messages said that a file was corrupt, but it wasn't. This faulty
> behaviour is a problem. You can either say "The preconditions for a
> working oo2c were not fulfilled!" (my old files in the wrong place)
> and "The behaviour of oo2c depends on its installation." (This would
> mean that the installation sometimes requires deleting old files,
> which should then be mentioned in the README-file for installation.)
> or you can say "This should not happen even with files in the wrong
> place!" (This would mean that this error has to be removed.)

Symbol files are versioned, and I change the version number whenever
something in the symbol file format changes.  Instead of reporting a
broken symbol file, the compiler should issue this error message:

*310: Invalid symbol file version (version is %)
     The version number of the symbol file format doesn't match the
     compiler.  This usually means that the symbol file was written
     with an older version of the compiler and that the new compiler
     has changed the file format.  The out-of-date symbol file should
     be deleted.

Even if I forgot to update the version number somewhere before 1.4.1,
the number _has_ changed with oo2c 1.4.2.  This should prevent this
kind of problems.

-- mva