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Re: Top 5 things that aren't in Debian but should be :-)



On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 09:33:26AM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Well, my biggest concern here is that subversion has broken its wire
> protocol several times over the past year.  Are there indications that
> this state of affairs has improved?  It doesn't make much sense to
> bother with subversion in a stable release, if our client is going to
> stop working with all the servers out there a third of the way through
> sarge's lifecycle.

When 1.0 is released (end of februari), there will definitely be no more
non-BC protocol changes. And there is good reason to believe the
protocol as it is now will be identical to that of 1.0:

According to their VERY limited list of things they are allowing to be
changed in subversion just before releasing[1], it's just internal API
changes (I say internal, because it matters only to subverion vs. libsvn
vs. libapache2-svn and that kind of stuff that is going to be in sync in
sarge anyway). Not that it doesn't matter at all (backporting other
things to sarge that will use that API could become a PITA), but as long
as you're using exclusively sarge, there is nothing to worry about.

<rant>
Also do note that subversion is very professionally developped, they
iteratively did a `one week add some feature', the other week `debug &
stabalize it and make it releaseable'.
At first I found their `this is alpha quality' quite tough on
themselves, because there is a lot of OSS out there that is beta or even
stable that is way more buggy. But actually it is a good thing as it
allowed them to break compatibility really hard if a new design was on
second thought slightly better, without adding ugly BC-klutches. And
even then they made sure to be always N-1 and N+1 compatible, just not
N+2 / N-2... (where N=api/protocol version)
</rant>

I would suggest to try to get subversion in sarge a.s.a.p., to prevent
unpleasant surprises when you do a last-minute addition.

--Jeroen

[1] http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/branches/1.0-stabilization/STATUS

-- 
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
+31-30-253 4499
Jeroen@A-Eskwadraat.nl
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl

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