[darcs-devel] darcs 2.16 TODOs

[Ben Franksen]

Hi Ganesh

as you have probably seen, I am going over lots of old issues trying to
clean up and see if there is anything urgent enough that we want to fix
it in 2.16. I think I am more or less through with that.

However, there is still one point blocking the release.

Prompted by your reply to my comment on issue2318 about _darcs/head and
maintaining compatibility, I looked a bit closer into the way we handle
the _darcs/format file.

Each format line can consist of several strings separated by '|'.
Unknown items after the first such separator allow read-only commands
like whatsnew, log, diff, show *, and clone to work, while repo
modifying commands are rejected. I don't know if this is documented
anywhere, but I tested that it works (by manually editing the format file).

Can we use that mechanism for the rebase old/new switch, too?

I think we could and therefore should do that! Reading a repo with an
old darcs version and a new-style rebase in progress should be
unproblematic; we just ignore the new out-of-repo rebase patch.

In the other direction i.e. using darcs-2.16 or later on a repo with an
old-style rebase, we would fail in the same way we do now, because we
cannot handle the in-repo rebase patch (except in darcs rebase upgrade).

Concretely, I propose for 2.16 we change the format from
rebase-in-progress to rebase-in-progress|0.2 (the "0.2" is the rebase
version as in the rebase patch).

What do you think?

Cheers
Ben