1.9rc1 countdown

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 11:55:46PM +0100 I heard the voice of
Jelmer Vernooij, and lo! it spake thus:
>
> That's going to have to happen at some point though, if rich roots
> are ever going to make it into a default format.

+1

If rich roots are never intended to be default or standard, we need to
hide them better.  If they are, we need to just fill in the missing
pieces and do it.  The current schism would be messy to deal with for
a few months; we've had it for more than a year.

rich-root-pack is available back to 1.0; that's almost a year old now.
And in a pinch, you can shove changed between that and subtree
formats, which takes us back more than a year and a half to 0.15.  If
all the pieces are in place (I'm qualified to hold no opinion on
whether that's so), I would suggest just making the 1.9 format rich
root, releasing it, and waiting 'till 1.10 or 1.11 to switch the
default.

It's probably worth spitting out warning messages on transfering
poor-root data into a rich-root repo to be sure users know they're
hopping down a trap door.  But sooner or later it's going to happen,
unless we never want to do it, in which case it needs to be buried.  I
don't think that more time is likely to lessen the pain or
backward-compat issues at all, and it's a continuing source of
confusion and user-trickery in the current state.


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.