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

[David Roundy]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 11:24:59PM +1100, Tim Barbour wrote:
> 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.

The plan is never to drop support for obsolete patch types.  To do so would
mean to break people's existing repositories, and I don't want to do that.
That's not entirely true.  I can imagine an upgrade path that would involve
editing all the old patches to redefine them to use the new patch types,
but I don't care for the idea.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org