"bzr branch" and repository.

[James Blackwell]

On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 11:18:48AM +0200, David Allouche wrote:
> > Its not about encouraging people to stay with an old version. Its about
> > not forcing a watershed on projects where one person chooses to upgrade.
> 
> I do not see how changing that behaviour would force a watershed.
> 
> If a user upgrades and publishes branches in a new format, that's not
> readable by the rest of the project, it's a social problem. If the rest
> of the project wants to stay with 0.7, that person can make a minor
> setup change to preserve compatibility.



The watershed isn't on the format, but on the codebase. I won't be able to
read your knit branch unless I upgrade my 0.7 client.  There's certainly
merit in that concern.

I generally agree with you though.  I don't think that the issue is as
severe as it looks on the surface. Consolidation branches (i.e. a pqm
managed branch and other merge authorities) would certainly have to keep a
copy of the most recent client available for newer branch.  These
branches, however, have the option of not upgrading the branches that they
expose that the world at large feeds off of.  They can leave the existing
old-style branches going for as long as is necessary.

On the flip side -- not upgrading on branch -- is annoying in practice.
Getting a branch in the wrong format into a shared repo involves the
following steps:

 1. branch them into A
 2. upgrade A
 3. branch A into shared repo as newA
 4. hack the parent for newA

I can see at least three good possible answers:
  1. add a --preserve option to branch that does not upgrade
     new branches as its pulled across the wire.
  2. add a --no-preserve option to branch that performs upgrade during
     branch.
  3. Provide a --preserve-parent option to branch that doesn't change the
     parent during branch. Then you can get an upgraded branch into shared
     storage. This would help ease some of the pain of getting
     wrong-format branches into a shared repo.



-- 
My home page:   <a href="http://jblack.linuxguru.net">James Blackwell</a>
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