On 10/4/07, Mark Phippard <markphip@gmail.com> wrote:
>.Bumping the format will effect the
> majority of users. Troll the lists and blogs. Regular users never
> understood the WC format change. There are all kind of posts out
> there where people state and think a 1.4 client requires a 1.4 server,
> entire companies not applying updates until they could update
> everything etc...
This is fascinating news to me! I had no idea the 1.4 wc-format bump
was such a big deal to typical users. (The again, I unsubscribed from
users@ two years ago, so I should expect to be out of the loop.)
The idea of people thinking a 1.4 client requires a 1.4 server (or
vice versa) is a problem as old as svn 1.1; it's not related to the
wc-format bump. Every time we release a new version, we see people
asking about compatibility policy... or worse, just assuming there is
no policy, and that absolutely everything must be upgraded. It's just
a common misconception among admins who are unable to read our
releasenotes. So it's not really relevant to our decision to bump or
not-bump the wc.
>
> There are lots of people stuck using old clients. For example, a user
> might be forced to use an old version of a development tool, and then
> forced to use an old SVN integration in that development tool. They
> also install the latest TortoiseSVN, and the next thing they know they
> cannot read any of their WC's with their old development tool. This
> is a big problem and will hit way more people than the scenario above.
This is a compelling argument, though. Ouch.
I guess I'd feel better if there were some screaming warning that
happened before an auto-format-bump happened. "WARNING: this is an
svn 1.5 client, and it's about to render your working copy unusable by
older versions. Are you should you want to proceed?" If the svn
commandline client, TSVN, and Subclipse all agreed to flash this
warning, I think we'd have 95% of the client base covered.
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Received on Thu Oct 4 16:26:47 2007