So many repo formats

Colin D Bennett colin at gibibit.com
Wed Nov 19 03:46:33 GMT 2008


On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:10:14 +0100
Gour <gour at mail.inet.hr> wrote:

> >>>>> "John" == John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> writes:
> 
> Hello John,
> 
> John>I think you underestimate the value of compatibility. I still
> John>have
> John> branches laying around from a while ago. 2 years isn't really
> John> that long to want to come back to hack on some software you
> John> didn't need to work on in the meantime.
> 
> Hmm, many people are moving from Win95, to Win98, to Win2k, WinXP
> etc. and in due course of time support for some of those old OS-es
> vanish.
> 
> Similarly, we moved from e.g. kernel 2.0, to 2.4, to 2.6 and some of
> the older ones are not longer supported.

There is a fundamental difference between:

1. (a) Not being able to run old Win3.1 programs on WinXP, or 
   (b) Not being able to run new XP programs on your old Win95

versus

2. Not being able to access the code from 5-10 years ago that you spent
   years developing, since is locked in an old bzr-0.92 repository for
   which bzr 1.62 has dropped support.

For 1., you presumably can upgrade Windows, or upgrade the program
(commercial/closed source program), or port it to the new OS (your own
source/free software).

For 2., you are dead in the water unless you can somehow get old
versions of bzr to work (maybe that would require using Python 2.x!
years down the line Python 2.x may no longer be maintained or commonly
available).

So I say that we always need a supported way to migrate repositories in
old bzr formats into something usable with the current format.  (I know
that I have had many headaches with Subversion in the past when they
changed repo formats or Berkeley DB versions, or something, or I tried
to access an svn repo I created 5 years ago.  I don't want to deal
with that again.)

OK, it's fine if old formats are 'hidden' from the main 'bzr help
formats' list, or even if they're in an optional plugin, if there's a
good reason for it, but if in a plugin or separate tool, then it would
have to be actively and continually maintained in order to be useful.

Regards,
Colin
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