[darcs-users] Reasons to delay upgrading
Nathan Gray
kolibrie at graystudios.org
Thu Nov 6 20:33:19 UTC 2008
On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 12:48:42PM -0700, zooko wrote:
> If I may issue a general request: darcs-2 isn't all here yet. It
> isn't yet a no-brainer for people to upgrade to darcs-2 from
> darcs-1. The main reasons you might want to refrain from upgrading
> to darcs-2 are:
>
> 1. Windows packaging - see this thread:
>
> http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2008-October/015065.html
>
> It isn't clear which Windows binary people should use. I recommend
> the old darcs-2.0.0 binary that I packaged, just because I know that
> it has worked well enough for some people.
>
> 2. Buildbot is not green:
>
> http://buildbot.darcs.net/waterfall
>
> Some people think of buildbot as being "just for developers" and not
> for users, but as speaking a user of a project, if it has a red
> buildbot (or no buildbot) then this is a warning flag that I should
> tread carefully and not upgrade unless I have to. Likewise, if
> people ask me if they should upgrade their darcs (and people do ask
> me that), then I currently say "Hm, well, it depends...". If the
> buildbot was green I would be a lot more encouraging of upgrading.
>
> 3. Current darcs trunk creates darcs-2-format repositories by
> default. This can lead to compatibility problems with people who are
> still using darcs-1. That is why, for example, Yitzchak Gale in the
> thread references above will not upgrade to the latest version of darcs.
4. Assurance that darcs-2 is as fast or faster than darcs-1.
We have some pretty big repositories (750M, 26500 patches), and many
commands are not fast (take longer than a couple seconds). I cannot
upgrade unless I know it is not going to be slower, since I have a few
people already complaining.
5. The upgrade path needs to account for multiple copies of a
repository.
We have about fifteen copies of our main repo, holding patches from
various stages of development and deployment (no two copies of the
repo are identical).
> Ideas:
>
> 1. Temporarily revert the behavior of creating darcs-2-format
> repositories by default, until after the next stable release.
>
> 2. Make the buildbot green. Once the buildbot turns green, then it
> will automatically upload the Windows binary of darcs which passed
> all unit tests to https://zooko.com/darcsbuildbot/uploads/
> zooko_allmydata_virtual2 , so that is the first element of:
>
> 3. Automate the production of complete binary packages for many
> platforms.
4. Publicly available benchmarking stats for repos before and after
conversion, and a way to easily run benchmarks locally on any darcs
repo, both darcs-1 format (using darcs-1 or darcs-2 executable) and
darcs-2 format (using darcs-2 executable).
5. A way to convert a repo based on an already converted repo or set
of repos.
-kolibrie
More information about the darcs-users
mailing list