Issue #840 has been open since the end of July 2002. Since then,
we've (mostly, I've) taken painstakingly small, gradual steps toward
completing the goal by ensuring that clients are servers that are no
farther apart in age than about 3 months can always communicate with
each other. Through it all no one has had to re-bootstrap or rush to
upgrade their servers.
Yesterday, I resumed work on the the next baby step in that task only
to find that the UUID incompatible stuff (which was reverted from the
0.19 release branch) is preventing my testing of old clients and HEAD
servers.
I was pretty upset.
See, it bothers me that I've gone through a ridiculous amount of
effort to preserve compatibility -- even when sometimes I want to just
say, "Look, pre-1.0, stuff is going to be incompatible and people can
just learn to live with that!" -- and have had to put off making
changes for months at a time to allow enough time for proper
dissemination of new code, and now this UUID brokenness gets by with a
little, "Well, we'll just let it skip this milestone and then be on
our way."
"Oh, no you don't."
I want to see a policy, noted in the HACKING file, that describes the
minimum length of time code needs to dance around compatibility
problems. If it's a month, fine. If it's three months, fine. If
it's "pre-1.0 we don't give a rip", fine. But it needs to be
something, and it needs to be written down and adhered to.
In the meantime, I'd like the incompatible UUID change to also be
reverted from /trunk so that I can try to make reasonably compatible
changes.
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Received on Wed Mar 12 17:32:45 2003