Firebird not experimental

[Ilmari Lauhakangas]

On 28.8.2024 12.32, Alexander Thurgood wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> 
> +1 to everything Mike wrote, with one further observation:
> 
> - the embedded HSQLDB is platform agnostic which means that one can 
> share it across OSes, and to the extent that a JDK is available, is 
> readable on all of the main platforms for which a LO release is 
> available (and even some for which LO doesn't provide release packages, 
> e.g. the BSDs).
> 
> My understanding was that the same is not guaranteed for embedded FB due 
> to the endian-(n/m)ess of the architectures.
> 
> Does the use of the backup format take this into account? In other 
> words, if I prepare an embedded FB ODB file on macOS Arm and send it to 
> someone on Windows x86_64, will it be readable/exploitable/modifiable ?

Yes it does. Quoting from my reply to you in 2022 on board-discuss:

seems the problem existed before Aug 2016, but not anymore. See 
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72987#c14 and 
comment 17 which refer to 
https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/0cc1ddf2d8d6bc7df74fdd8f8f97381df681177d

Quoting from Lionel's comment 17:

'The problem was fixed by saving (within the odb zip structure) firebird 
data in an endianess-independent format, called the "backup" format, in 
a file with extension ".fbk".'

Ilmari