So many repo formats

[David Ingamells]

-----Original message-----

From: Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org>
Sent: Wed 11/19/08 03:17:16
To: Gour <gour at mail.inet.hr>; 
CC: bazaar at lists.canonical.com; 
Subject: Re: So many repo formats

Gour writes:

> So, I understand you could have many old branches laying around, but do
> not understand what's the problem to fire up some small script and
> upgrade all those repos?

Well, actually, you can't understand.  What you can understand is that
it *does* annoy other bzr "customers", for reasons only they can give
(that's why *we* can't give you a full explanation), so bzr shouldn't
force upgrades of repos that aren't currently in use.  It should find
another way to simplify the interface for you.

N.B. This is quite a different thing from forcing upgrades of in-use
repos: the customer has a choice of not upgrading bzr if the features
in the new version don't outweigh the annoyance of upgrading in-use
repos.  But if you de-support old repos, then the customer must
document the need for and maintain the old version (which can be
painful, less so with a Python app like bzr, but it's still not
trivial) or *find* all the relevant repos and upgrade them while you
still can.

There are yet other workarounds, of course, but they all involve
imposing unnecessary work on people who don't want to do it.  Not a
good way to garner support for your tool.


Use case:

Joe's project X  seems to be finished so he makes a final release and backs up the repos to an archive (e.g. DVD or tape). 

 

2 years later project X needs to be resurrected (not so unusual, I've seen this several times over the last few years). Manager gives me the DVD and says get on with it.

 

I restore the backup. I now have a repos with a format that is at least 2 years old. But oh dear! Because of Gour's proposal that format is no

longer supported by bazaar :(((

 

 
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