[darcs-users] patch formats [was Binary patches]

[Tim Barbour]

David Roundy writes:
[...]
 > My goal is not to change patch types, and if I do so in a
 > backwards-incompatible way, to simply add a new patch type (once 1.0 is
 > out).  This is sort of a poor man's version of patch type versions, but has
 > the advantage of encouraging me to think before defining a patch type's
 > behavior.

Sounds reasonable, and simple. It seems to do the job of a minor format-version
number, but not the major one, however that will not be a problem, if you intend
never to need to drop backward compatibility for an old format. I suppose if you
did eventually end up dropping any archaic patch types, you could always add
them to a list of obsolete types that darcs knew about.

Tim