Performance testing of ignore changes?

[Martin Pool]

2010/1/5 John Whitley <whitley at bangpath.org>:
> John Arbash Meinel <john <at> arbash-meinel.com> writes:
>> I'll also note that I'm not really sure how to introduce this and worry
>> about backwards compatibility. If older bzr versions just ignore the '!'
>> line, that might be ok, though I have the feeling they will abort, and
>> possibly fail to read the whole file.
>
> I don't know how much the implementation has changed over time, but the current
> implementation would just interpret '!foo' literally and create a regexp that
> matches those four characters in an attempt to ignore them.  Given the rarity of
> files starting with '!', the ignore file interpretation would mostly just revert
> to the existing behavior, i.e. observing only positive ignores.
>
> Fortunately it's easy to smoke test backwards compatibility here.  Can someone
> suggest an old version that's a good test candidate? (

2.0.3.

As a rule of thumb, I think we should care the most about backward
compatibility to currently supported stable releases, which at the
moment is only 2.0.3.  People on older things are encouraged to
upgrade.  Some case-by-case common sense is needed of course -
interpreting it as the regexp '!foo' is more acceptable than crashing.
-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>