Subject: Re: [kernel.org users] [RFD] On deprecating "git-foo" for builtins

From: Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:51:03 +0200

Jeff King wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 03:33:26PM -0700, Perry Wagle wrote:
> 
>> I'm going by the reasoning shown in this thread.  Why not?  I'm looking 
>> for a way not to have to do exhaustive testing on those scripts, so would 
>> love to hear it.
> 
> Ultimately you must be the judge of what and how much to test on your
> systems. But if you are asking if there are other similar compatibility
> bugs in 1.6.0, then my opinion, as somebody who follows the git list
> quite closely and contributes some code, is that no, there are not.
> 

There's one, actually. The default pack-index version is increased now,
so really, really old clients (pre-1.4.5) won't be able to understand
the packs generated by default by a new server. I haven't examined how
and when this affect clients, although I believe only those using an
ancient client that fetch pre-created packs over dumb transport (http
or rsync) repo packed with pack.indexversion = 2, or with 1.6.0
without a pack.indexversion setting at all, will suffer.

Encountering that particular scenario should be very rare indeed.

Apart from that, I agree with Jeff about there not being any problems
regarding compatibility, and I wholeheartedly agree with the hint to
start reading the releasenotes.

As for suggesting future improvements, perhaps relnotes entries with
the slightest chance of breaking anything for anyone could be marked
"COMPAT" or something, so Perry and the likes of him can find them
easily. I also agree with the suggestion that git itself should be
free of a deprecated way of doing things at the deprecation date.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   [email-masked]
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
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