Re: [PATCH] cvsimport: rewrite to use cvsps 3.x to fix major bugs

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 12, 2013, 18:26 UTC
Message-ID: <20130112182649.GC4624@elie.Belkin>
In-Reply-To: <50F17DB0.2050802@alum.mit.edu>

Michael Haggerty wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Regarding your claim that "within a few months the Perl git-cvsimport is
> going to cease even pretending to work": It might be that the old
> git-cvsimport will stop working *for people who upgrade to cvsps 3.x*.
> But it is not realistic to expect people to synchronize their git and
> cvsps version upgrades.  It is even quite possible that this or that
> Linux distribution will package incompatible versions of the two packages.

Moreover, I feel an obligation to point the following out:

In a hypothetical world where cvsps 3.x simply breaks "git cvsimport" it is likely that some distributions would just stick to the existing cvsps and not upgrade to 3.x. Maybe that's a wrong choice, but that's a choice some would make. An even more likely outcome in that hypothetical world is that they would ship it renamed to something like "cvsps3" alongside the existing cvsps. Or they could rename the old version to "cvsps2". If we were the last holdout, we could even bundle it as compat/cvsps.

So please do not act as though the cvsps upgrade is a crisis that we need to break ourselves for at threat of no longer working at all. The threat doesn't hold water.

Luckily you have already written patches to make "git cvsimport" work with cvsps 3.x, and through your work you are making a better argument: "The new cvsimport + cvsps will work better, at least for some users, than the old tool."

Just don't pretend you have the power to force a change for a less sensible reason than that!

Hope that helps, Jonathan