Notes on Porting

New versions provide new features, but may have the unfortunate side-effect of breaking many existing applications. This document is intended to provide a step-by-step guide to updating your Swarm applications to use the latest version as quickly and painlessly as possible.

This document contains detailed examples for porting versions equal to, or later than, Swarm 1.0.5.

Users trying to port from versions earlier than 1.0.5, are advised to first view the compatibility section of the 1.0.5 swarmdocs. First perform those changes in sequence, (i.e. if you have apps compatible with Swarm 1.0.3 - first make the 1.0.3 => 1.0.4 changes, followed by the 1.0.4 => 1.0.5 changes) and then perform the changes described here. You may notice that some of the changes overlap as earlier versions may have merely deprecated some functionality, whilst later versions actually disabled it. This has been done to phase new functionality in, and old functionality out over several releases, so the user isn't hit with an enormous burden every minor release.

We intend that most application changes should be covered, but given that we can never know in advance how a user has employed the software, we cannot guarantee that all potential application changes will be covered in the document explicitly.

Key for changes:

• (*) = absolutely necessary changes (if not performed, will fail to compile)

• (x) = not-strictly necessary, but highly recommended changes (deprecated coding practice, or will produce a compiler warning, if not performed)