[Quilt-dev] Backward compatibility of quilt's pc directory

[Martin Quinson]

Hello,

Recent changes in quilt broke the backward compatibility of the openned
tree. Specificaly, the pc directory of trees created with versions <=0.30
are not readable with versions >=0.32 (if I understood correctly). This
makes working trees unusable on system update.

I see this lack of backward compatibility as a major show stopper for the
future of the project. If this is not solved, it is impossible to package it
properly as I tryied to do for the Debian project.

Indeed, it will require the users to pop all quilt trees before updating
their machine. Moreover, in the case the administrator and the user are two
different persons, this is even more problematic.


If you think that no further change to the internal layout will ever happen,
I guess we can live with that, and suffer the angry of the users.

If other changes may happen in the future, the minimal solution would be to
add a 'quilt_version' file in the pc dir, so that the problem can be at
least correctly diagnosticed, and proper error messages produced.

A better solution would be to keep older 'refresh' and 'pop' tools  so that
it becomes to pop a tree (but not to work on it) even after a system upgrade.

Of course a yet better solution would be to come up with a layout converter
tool which would not need to pop the tree completely and start a new one.


Andreas, you are by far the main developer out here (shame on me for not
helping more), so the decision about which solution to take is yours.

I'll do my best to help you in the implementation, even if "my best" may be
rather limited...


Thanks, Mt.

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