Re: I'm a long time user with a long time complaint

On 9/3/2010 6:30 AM, Andy Levy wrote:
> Total backwards compatibility is the enemy of progress. Look at
> how long it held Microsoft back.

I'd state it more generally: progress and usability are competing goals.
Snide comments about the size of Microsoft's install base aside, from
the end-user's perspective progress is something that's nice to have,
but lack of usability is a game-killer just because of how frustrating
the experience is.

The man has a point (however inappropriately delivered): you can't use
svn clients with different versions on the same WC. It's annoying. The
solution as proposed is simply "don't do that", which really isn't a
solution at all.

Now, certainly there are technical reasons why it makes sense that svn
works this way. I'm sure it would be a gigantic maintenance burden to
build some kind of compatibility shim system into svn so that it could
continue to operate on old WCs. (And this is still the wrong list for
this conversation.)

However, that doesn't stop it from being annoying when you run into the
problem. I think a more appropriate response would have been: yes, it's
a technical limitation of svn. However, it would be very hard to fix,
and the developers haven't felt so far that it's worth trying to fix the
problem.

-Mike

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Received on 2010-09-03 20:01:58 CEST