[darcs-users] keeping unusable stuff around

[David Roundy]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 01:31:28AM +0200, Tommy Pettersson wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 05:25:26PM +0200, Albert Reiner wrote:
> > - Tag the old version of C1, record the changes, use |send| to make a
> >   patchbundle that is then simply stored in the D branch, and unrecord
> >   the changes in C1.  This seems nicer to me, but I am not sure it is
> >   a good idea.  In particular, is the patchbundle produced by `darcs
> >   send` suitable for storing random patches in the long run, or is it
> >   liable to change?
> 
> Even if the patchbundle format changes (I think I want to add the new
> repo format information to it, for example), I hope newer versions of
> darcs will still always understand old patchbundles. But then, thinking
> some more, since darcs is going to be able to upgrade older patch
> formats, old older patch formats _could_ be phased out gradually if one
> wanted, and in that case recorded patchbundles could eventually rot out
> of old age.

I hope never to remove support for at least reading older patch formats.
We've already removed support for *commuting* "merger 0.9" patches, but I
believe we can still read them--and they date from back when darcs had very
few users.

In any case, a patch bundle should bitrot at the same rate as an old
repository.  For this use case I'd usually follow Ganesh's suggestion, but
if it's a small change sometimes I use the patch bundle approach (which is
also a perfectly good idea).
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net