[MERGE] New 'development' format.

[Robert Collins]

On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 00:06 -0500, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Robert Collins wrote:
> > This is the new repository format I was alluding to.
> 
> > +We believe that we can continue to gain substantial performance benefits
> > +by altering the repository storage in bzr. The more feedback we can get
> > +on the changes during the development process the better.
> > +
> > +To make it possible to get more feedback we are going to expose the
> > +current development formats to the users of our development trunk
> > +'bzr.dev'. The technical details of the individual formats are at the
> > +end of this document.
> 
> I am uncomfortable with this approach.
> 
> I feel that non-developers should not be playing with experimental
> formats until they are proposed for becoming stable.

Well, this leads to a serious chicken and egg problem. packs were stable
in terms of disk layout and data many weeks before they were proposed
for being non-experimental, and yet I only know of 3-4 beta testers in
that entire time. We had similar problems with the introduction of
weaves in the first place, and again at the split out metadir work. I
consider this a process bug, which this patch is aiming to address.

> I will not work on development, because I do not want the additional
> burden of providing an upgrade path.

Thats fine; I think its reasonable to make a decision about whether you
want to allow pulling to/from formats you are working on. Note that if
you allow fetching from your new format to pack-0.92[-subtree]|rich-root
(btw, the name difference confuses *me* here), then you have an upgrade
path. All that needs to happen is to leave the code for the format in
place until the next release.

> > +If you are using ``bzr-svn`` or are testing the prototype subtree support,
> > +you can still use and assist in testing the development formats. The
> > +commands to use are identical to the ones given above except that the
> > +name of the format to use is ``development-subtree``.
> 
> I am also uncomfortable with this.  If you want bzr-svn users doing
> testing, then please provide a rich-root variant of development.

I don't particularly care about bzr-svn users testing the stuff I'm
working on, but we can do this. The main problem though is that 'bzr
help formats' gets quite long :(.

-Rob
-- 
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20080107/f52fdc3d/attachment.pgp