Re: [xmonad] Upgrading repo formats

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 11:58 AM, Spencer Janssen wrote:

On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 10:14:28PM -0400, Gwern Branwen wrote:

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On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 3:40 PM, adam vogt wrote:

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On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 1:16 PM, Gwern Branwen wrote:

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While waiting on a slow connection today to darcs get XMC, I had time to ponder. The patches are (or would be) in my global cache, so it could go much faster. Why doesn't it? Because xmonad-contrib and xmonad-core are both still using darcs-1 fomatted repositories.

Is there any particular reason to not upgrade? Even Debian Stable has Darcs 2.x (http://packages.debian.org/lenny/darcs), so it's not as if there are many people who would be unable to do a darcs get.

-- gwern

I support this.

Since this isn't something we can easily rollback, (without the messy situation of keeping the unupgraded repository updated in parallel), it is important to have some consensus before updating repo formats.

What now? Nobody has objected here, and it's been several days, so I would guess not many will object in the future.

I would point out that besides the mere 12 pulls using darcs 1.x this month - which could all be due to just 1 user - Xmonad has broken ghc 6.6 support, and I wouldn't be surprised if ghc 6.8 support was now broken. So anyone actually *using* darcs xmonad-core/xmonad-contrib must be using a recent GHC, and there are Darcs 2.xs which support 6.8 and probably 6.6 as well.

Which implies that anyone using darcs xmonad is capable of upgrading to Darcs 2. We don't to worry about anyone locked down to Darcs 1.x.

The question is whether we have the will to actually upgrade the repos and make people re-'darcs get' the repos.

I think we do, and that the long-term benefits of cached patches and fewer conflicts and active Darcs support and whatnot justify the short-term pain. But ultimately, while I could unilaterally upgrade xmonad-contrib, dons and sjanssen are the only ones who can upgrade xmonad-core, and I'd feel pretty silly doing only half the job.

-- gwern

I do support switching, but I do have one concern.  As I understand it, after switching we won't be able to apply any darcs 1 patches to the darcs 2 repo.  We would need to resolve any outstanding forks and clean up all the pending patches on the mailing list.

darcs convert --help says "WARNING: the repository produced by this command is not understood by Darcs 1.x, and patches cannot be exchanged between repositories in darcs-1 and darcs-2 formats." (I also just converted xmonad-core and tried applying one of the old patches; didn't work.)

Also, is there some documentation or a guide for converting?  I really don't want to screw up our repository.

http://darcs.net/manual/node7.html#SECTION007111000000000000000 I think. -- gwern