[darcs-users] Help with team upgrade on Windows

Yitzchak Gale gale at sefer.org
Mon Oct 27 11:22:58 UTC 2008


Trent W. Buck wrote:
> Official... backports... there aren't any for Etch.

I thought not. Too bad.

> I believe backports.org is volunteer-driven; perhaps you'd like
> to get involved and create a backport?

Indeed, I would love to, but I'm under deadline pressure
right now so it's not possible unfortunately.

I wrote:
>> If there isn't a backport, would it work to just run one
>> of those generic staticly-linked linux binaries on etch?

> I believe that generally works for Darcs, though you might get exciting
> libc version mismatch hell

Right, that was my question. I suspect that is what would happen.

>> Note that the GHC 6.8.3 binary doesn't run - the GHC
>> team says that the the current stable version of Debian
>> is "too old".

> Well yes, the normal procedure for making a static binary would be to
> compile it on a modern machine, not on the actual target Etch machine.

Unless you are compiling an etch-compatible binary.
Then you need to compile it either on etch, or in an
etch-compatible chroot jail.

btw, etch machines are "modern" in the sense that etch
is the absolutely current up-to-date stable release of Debian,
deployed on production servers around the world. It would
be IT suicide to deploy anything riskier on a production server
(for many purposes). So I think that VC apps like darcs -
and compilers like GHC - ought to have some supported
version that works on that platform. It doesn't have to be
the latest version. Of course, that does create complexities,
such as the present one.

>> If none of the above options is possible, I'm afraid the
>> server might have to stay with the etch package, at 1.0.9rc1.
>> And that would mean that 2.1.0 is out of the question on
>> the Windows machines until lenny is released.

> The program Darcs 2 is backwards compatible with Darcs 1 repository
> format (called "old-fashioned-inventory").  Even if you can't upgrade
> all hosts to use the Darcs 2 program, you will still get a superior
> experience by upgrading some hosts to the Darcs 2 program while keeping
> your repositories in old-fashioned-inventory format.

The problem is that 2.1.0 by default will create V2 repos, which won't
be supported by 1.0.9rc1 on the server. Even if it's possible to get 2.1.0
to create V1 repos by some configuration or by using some flag, it's
not always practical to do that across a whole team of people.

Well, I hope lenny will be released soon, and that we'll be able to
upgrade the server not too long after that. Until then, it looks like
we'll be stuck with 1.0.9rc1 on the server and 2.0.x on the clients.

Thanks,
Yitz


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