Re: Numeric multiplication overflow errors

On Fri, 2 Jul 2021 at 12:56, David Rowley <dgrowleyml(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2 Jul 2021 at 22:55, Dean Rasheed <dean(dot)a(dot)rasheed(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > Here's an update with the
> > last set of changes discussed.
>
> Looks good to me.

Thanks for the review and testing!

> Just the question of if we have any problems changing the serialized
> format in the back branches. I'm not sure if that's something we've
> done before. I only had a quick look of git blame in the
> serial/deserial functions and the only changes I really see apart from
> a few cosmetic ones were a57d312a7 and 9cca11c91. Both of which just
> went into master.

Thinking about this more, I think it's best not to risk back-patching.
It *might* be safe, but it's difficult to really be sure of that. The
bug itself is pretty unlikely to ever happen in practice, hence the
lack of prior complaints, and in fact I only found it by an
examination of the code. So it doesn't seem to be worth the risk.

OTOH, the original bug, with numeric *, is one I have hit in practice,
and the fix is trivial and low risk, so I would like to backpatch that
fix.

Regards,
Dean