Re: [Monotone-devel] any more 0.26 blockers?

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sat, Apr 08, 2006 at 01:54:17PM -0400, address@hidden wrote:
> I've been following this mailing list for a few months now, having tries 
> and failed to set up a trouble-free monotone some time age (I thing what 
> wasback in the 0,18 or 0,19 days), and I'm starting to suspect it's 
> getting to be time to try it again.  It does look as if the basic design 
> is what I'd like to use.

Glad to hear it!

> After 0.26, do you expect further big changes that might affect 
> compatibility?  At this point in my available free time, I'm not 
> looking for something hat has to upgraded every month or so.  I 
> haven't managed to find time to compile the nvidia-kernel for my AMD64 
> yet in the past three months.

If you're just using monotone for your own projects, you never have to
upgrade it.  I think there might still be people out there using,
like, 0.15-era monotone.  Seems kind of crazy to me, because they're
missing out on all the Pure Unadulterated Awesomeness that has been
added since then, but if you're saying you don't want to upgrade, then
what you're _asking_ for is to miss out on that, so, well, easy to
oblige!

In case you're worried about the upgrade path itself, we do everything
we can to make sure that arbitrarily large "jumps" work well.
Monotone still contains code to upgrade straight from 0.4 (or maybe
even a little earlier, I'm not sure).  Obviously, jumping between two
arbitrary versions is not a case that's pounded on as much by users as
the n -> n+1 case, but the code paths involved are the same and I
don't know why there'd be any problem.

That said, there are more incompatible changes coming up (hopefully
none as big as 0.26, but several will have similar effects in practice
for people upgrading).  The main ones I know of are:
  -- eventually we will switch off of SHA1 (who knows when)
  -- we will probably have to re-issue all certs again at some point,
     when we move to a cleaned-up trust model.
Plus, netsync will need a few more incompatible changes, though these
don't have to create whole-project flag days.

> And would anyone happen to have tested it on a Debian AMD64 platform?  
> I'd probably be looking for conpatible packages for Debian i386 sarge 
> and Debian AMD64 etch -- or starting to learn how to build such a 
> package from scratch from source code.  Though I suppose it wouldn't be 
> too hard if there were a suitable Debian source package on *any* 
> architecture.  (says someone who has never built a Debian package 
> before, not even from a Debian source package).
> 
> I notice that there is a Debian packages for 0.24 in both sid and 
> etch.  But that, I gather, is major changes before 0.26.

If you're starting now, you definitely want to start with an 0.26ish
version.

I haven't tried it on debian AMD64, but one of our continuous testers
is gentoo AMD64:
  http://venge.net/monotone/buildbot/
and everything works there.  Of course, you can also simply use the
i386 binaries.

I'm not sure what's up with the official debian packages; I haven't
heard anything from the debian maintainer for months.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
So let us espouse a less contested notion of truth and falsehood, even
if it is philosophically debatable (if we listen to philosophers, we
must debate everything, and there would be no end to the discussion).
  -- Serendipities, Umberto Eco