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

[Martin Quinson]

On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 11:02:44PM +0200, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 20:19, Martin Quinson wrote:
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> It may well be that there will be future changes in the on-disk format.
> It is likely too late to introduce versioning for the current format as
> we cannot easily tell the different formats from each other at the
> moment. We can introduce versioning when the next incompatible change
> becomes necessary. Depending on how big that change will be, we can
> either convert the on-disk format, or reject the meta-data.

Of course, I'd prefer the first way ;)

> We could add some heuristics to detect old meta-data formats. I would
> probably be able to find out what changed exactly without taking too
> much time, so we could in theory add version numbers to existing trees.
> I don't think this would be worth it, though.
>
[...]
> > 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.
> 
> Because of what I have said above, I would pefer to do nothing at the
> moment. I am meanwhile convinced about the usefulness of versioning, so
> the next change in the meta-data format would be the right time to also
> add this. Do you agree?

This looks resonable to me, even if I would have prefered a convertion
mecanism right now, of course. I feel bad about the users who will update
their box and discover that their tree in not functional anymore. I hope
that Dan will accept this situation (I'm not Debian developper yet, he's my
sponsor).

But if you can promise that this situation won't happen again, I'll warn the
users of this issue during the installation, giving them a chance to stop it
on time. I don't like it because it may be some situations leading to users
sticked with the wrong version. But since quilt was introduced so recently
to debian, I guess it's ok.

Dan, what do you think?

Thanks for your consideration, and for this great tool, Mt.

-- 
Each language has its purpose, however humble.  Each language expresses the
Yin and Yang of software.  Each language has its place within the Tao.
But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
          -- The Tao of programming

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