Re: Rolling back to 1.6.x Subversion

[Jeremy Bopp <jeremy at bopp dot net>]

On 11/17/2011 01:39, Andrey Repin wrote:
> Greetings, Jeremy Bopp!
> 
>> All I really wanted to know was why it was important to hang back from the
>> latest available version when getting the older one was less than trivial.
>> Not using anything more than the command line for svn (infrequently at that)
>> made me forget how often that project changes formats in the working copies
>> and the ramifications of that behavior.
> 
> On my memory, it wasn't changed even once in four years. Or all changes were
> transparent.
> The main problem with 1.7 I see myself, I described earlier: No way to tell at
> a glance, if the directory you're working with is versioned or not.

I want to think that they only change the working copy format when the
minor version changes, but I also think that they have done that with
every minor version transition since at least 1.4.  I know I remember
seeing the client request to upgrade my working copies at least once
before anyway.  Whether or not that upgrade was required, I can't say.

Regardless of the time period between minor version bumps, that rate of
change in working copies seems excessive to me given the relative
stability of other SCM tools, but that's just my likely ignorant
opinion. ;-)

Maybe like you say, the other transitions allowed for some backward
compatible support.  It's odd then that they wouldn't allow for that in
the 1.7 client.  I would expect the 1.7 client to at least support
*using* existing version 1.6 working copies in order to avoid exactly
this sort of interoperability issue, but it sounds like it does not.
That's very unfortunate if true.

If true, maybe it would make sense to allow for parallel installation of
svn versions that differ by minor number and use the alternatives system
to allow the user to select a particular one if they decided to install
both.  In other words, it would be handy to offer something like
subversion16 and subversion17 packages as well as an alias package named
just subversion that would pull in the latest version.  That's probably
more work than it's worth though given the number of sub-packages also
offered with subversion.

-Jeremy

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple