[clbuild-devel] postmodern: incompatible changes

[David Lichteblau]

Quoting Victor Kryukov (victor.kryukov at gmail.com):
> a/ That's postmodern authors/users problem, clbuild is not involved,
> or

I think clbuild serves as a test case here, making it easy to find out
whether packages are broken or incompatible with each other.

In practise, package authors will react quickly to reports that their
software has stopped working, and fix it soon.

(If they don't, the package is evidently unsupported, and it's
questionable whether it should be in the project list at all.)

> b/ clbuild maintainers should have change postmodern download link to
> the [2] in the transition period, or

If there is in fact such an intentional transition period longer than a
few days, and if we include software that depends on the old API, then
yes, absolutely.  In that case we should change the repository URL.

I haven't followed the postmodern situation.  Do we need the -old
repository?  Do you have a tested patch for the project list that I
should apply?

(Sometimes the opposite answer is right.  cffi is constantly being
developed in yet another darcs repository.  But lots of software out
there actually depends on those new features, so it would be harmful to
still download the main repository with its stable-but-outdated API.)

> c/ something else?

Well, there is perhaps a technical solution to part of this problem.

Without special support from clbuild, users would downgrade individual
projects by finding the last commit that worked and reverting to that.
Modern VCSs like svn and git make the last step easy, but first you need
to find the version that worked.

So we could automate that perhaps: Record the version that was installed
after each "update".

Then a new command "clbuild downgrade" could be written that checks out
the (or one of the) last recorded versions.

I'm sure that would be easy to do with svn and git (mostly likely darcs
also makes it easy).  I'm afraid it's going to be messy with CVS though.


d.