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Re: maunal WC upgrade test fallout

From: Branko Čibej <brane_at_wandisco.com>
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2012 18:15:29 +0100

On 02.11.2012 15:15, C. Michael Pilato wrote:
> On 11/02/2012 09:07 AM, Branko Čibej wrote:
>> On 02.11.2012 04:34, Stefan Sperling wrote:
>>> On Fri, Nov 02, 2012 at 02:59:10AM +0100, Stefan Sperling wrote:
>>>> I went ahead and disabled auto-upgrades in r1404856.
>> During the SVN Live conferences I asked people, privately, about their
>> opinion on automatic vs. manual upgrades. The overwhelming response was
>> that they wait for all the clients to catch up before upgrading. Given
>> these results, my opinion leans towards leaving auto-upgrades on, but
>> spending more effort on documenting that there's no way back.
> I'm not convinced that your results (as presented, at least) actually tell
> us anything other than that our more-aware users already expect
> auto-upgrading to occur and to screw them over, so they avoid it. That's
> seems to fall quite a bit short of a validation of the auto-upgrade
> approach! ;-)

True.

> What would have been more interesting to know is how they felt about the
> required one-time manual 'svn upgrade' in 1.7 -- was it troublesome for
> their processes?

I got exactly one response about the 1.7 upgrade, and it went like this:
"checked out new working copies because the upgrade didn't work for us."
Which doesn't really help all that much in retrospect.

> If our more-aware users already work to upgrade their
> software in concert, and have no concerns with the manual 'svn upgrade'
> step, then our auto-or-not-upgrade decision is a moot point for them. Their
> opinion is, therefore, disinteresting.
>
> What remains, then, are our less-aware users, who'll -- if we decide to
> continue auto-upgrading -- will wind up fussing with all the inherent
> problems of mixed-pedigree Subversion clients and for whom extra
> documentation is pointless (because if they read *that*, they'd be more
> aware!). :-)

The real problem I see with manual upgrades is that you can do /nothing/
with the new client until you've upgraded your working copy. That's a
regression from what we did up to and including 1.6, but it's not easy
to fix because the WC-NG design does not really admit the concept of
read-only operations. Of course, in this respect automatic upgrades are
no better, just the other way around.

Do we want to delay 1.8 until we /can/ do backward-compatible read-only
operations? I somehow don't think so.

-- Brane
Received on 2012-11-02 18:42:49 CET

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