So many repo formats

[Matthieu Moy]

Gour <gour at mail.inet.hr> writes:

>>>>>> "Matthieu" == Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy at imag.fr> writes:
>
> Matthieu> But AFAIK, WinXP is still able to execute 15 year-old MS-DOS
> Matthieu> binaries, And MS supports each of their OS for at least 5
> Matthieu> years.
>
> Hmm...
>
> Matthieu> So I don't think the analogy plays in favor of breaking
> Matthieu> compatibility.
>
> Lot of DOS programs cannot work any longer on modern CPUs...

How many years happened between the birth of these programs and the
time they were no longer executables?

(to be compared with the age of bzr, which is IIRC < 4 years)

> Otoh, e.g. there are GUI programs on e.g. WinXP which do not work by
> going from one SP to the other...

Usually, this is because they relied on bugs which have been fixed. MS
used to work a lot on bug-to-bug compatibility, but it seems they
consider it less important now. And that's really part of their
success, because the old CD that a friend of a friend burnt years ago
still contain stuff that you can use on your PC. And that's also part
of Vista's failure : most people don't like it because it doesn't run
their old software or device.

> All in all, I do not understand what do you want to accomplish with your
> remark...and if bzr devs think they must support all of them eternally,
> that's their decision in the same way I can decide which DVCS to use,
> but that it creates bad image in the public, it does indeed.

I think you don't understand the problem. There are two points with
having many repository formats:

1) the repository format changes frequently
2) old repository formats are still supported.

1) clearly gives bad image to bzr, but I don't understand why you seem
to consider that 2) is the point harming bzr's image.

-- 
Matthieu