feature negotiation?

I was talking with someone on #svn, and heard a story about how he had
used a very old (0.6) svn client to try and update his working copy.
The server then sent binary diffs (a relatively new-ish feature) that
ended up trashing his working copy.

My question is: do we need client/server feature negotiation?

Note that there *is* feature negotiation happening already... but it's
only happening on the general level of HTTP/DAV. The client and
server trade keywords that refer to supported HTTP methods.

But I'm talking about *svn* specific feature negotiation. Like, "hey,
do you accept/send svndiff data?"

I'm posting this question to the list, because I see two possible
responses to this situation:

  * "Who cares, this is pre-alpha software. Glitches like that are to
    be expected if you don't 'keep up'".

  * "We'd better create svn-level feature negotiation. Something like
     this might bite us in the future again."

Thoughts?

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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:37:07 2006