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Re: Another working copy library

From: Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman_at_red-bean.com>
Date: 2007-02-01 15:57:29 CET

On 1/30/07, Greg Stein <gstein@lyra.org> wrote:

> And FWIW, I am very, very strongly against any notion of 2.0.
> Personally, I see it as a failure in creativity. Shooting for 2.0 is a
> shortcut. It's a way to avoid the difficult problems. It is a way to
> shove development problems/maintenance at the bazillions of users that
> Subversion has today. Consider: 1.x clients and 2.0 servers are not
> compatible. 2.x clients and 1.x servers are not compatible. Each time
> a user wants to check something out, they will need to know the
> version of the server. Holy shit will that suck. Big time. Badly. One
> month of extra development to ensure 1.x compatibility, or a bazillion
> man-months of productivity loss due to a major version change. Eesh.
> Doesn't seem like a fair tradeoff. Hey... to be fair, it's true that
> I'm not personally spending that extra dev time, but I don't think
> that means the point is any less valid. And if/where I get to assign
> or volunteer time for svn dev? It'll be on 1.x. I think that the
> *concept* of 2.0 is just giving up.

I agree that if we define 2.0 to mean "break all compatibility,
everywhere", then yes... it will be a huge PITA for users. But
presumably, there's some big net gain that the users get in exchange
for their forced-upgrade pain, no? Isn't that sort of the point.

While I agree with your sentiment above, it also looks like an excuse
to never, ever, ever release 2.0. Your argument above could apply to
pretty much every radical feature or design-change that ever gets
proposed in the future, couldn't it?

So I'm curious, Greg -- in your mind, what *would* justify a 2.0?

> A new working copy library would be awesome. Start with code, then
> figure out the middle ground for 1.x. At some future time, 2.x can
> iterate to improve and to shed dead weight.
>

If svn 1.X keeps coming out with huge new features (merge tracking,
totally redesigned WC, revlog repository, some optional degree of
distributed version control, ...) ... and then we release an
incompatible 2.0 which just "sheds dead weight" and implements things
more efficiently... is that worth all of the users' pain in upgrading?
 My impression is that people would be only willing to upgrade for
earth-shaking features, not speed optimizations.

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Received on Thu Feb 1 15:58:02 2007

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