[xmonad] Upgrading repo formats

[Gwern Branwen]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 3:40 PM, adam vogt <vogt.adam at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 1:16 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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