On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 11:20:23AM +0200, Petr Baudis wrote: > > (iii) Most importantly, this is not about waiting another few > years for Debian to catch up, since the next stable release > should really be upcoming rather soon: > > http://debian-community.org/LennyReleaseSchedule/ Even if Lenny will be released right on the scheduler (which I seriously doubt), Etch will be around for another year. In fact, the last release of oldstable (sarge) happened on April 12 this year. Thus delaying of indexversion=2 does not help much here. Anyone who is more or less seriously about using Git grabs it from backports. The downside of delaying is that any incompatible changes are much less welcome by users during minor releases than major ones. People tend to read release notes during major releases more carefully and think whether they prefer new features or backward compatibility. This choice will not be the same for anyone, but changing default settings on the major release is much more appropriate than during minor ones. > > (iv) These problems do not concern people who are currently > _actively_ _working_ with Git; these people hopefully do not > use 1.4 willingly and already use Git from backports.org. > This is about user experience for casual users who are quite > possibly interested only in read-only tracking of upstream > using Git - these people will likely use default Debian Git > version and that is okay, because frankly, for them, the > 1.5 improvements do not really matter much. This is also > large class of prospective future real Git users and we might > not want to ruin Git's reputation in their eyes. I disagree. It is not Git does not support the old format, but it switches on the new one as default on the next major release, which is a sensible thing to do. Those repos that think that access for Git 1.4 users is important for them can set indexformat=1. As to prospective future real Git users, anyone who is trying to use Git 1.4 is going to hit by many usability issues that were resolved in 1.5; and there is no community support for Git 1.4 either -- you can ask about any problem with Git 1.4 on this list, and the only answer you'll get is that you should upgrade your Git. So, there is no way for newcommers to start using Git 1.4 and be satisfied with it. Finally, 18 months since 1.4.4 may not appear as a long time ago for other projects that are being developed for many years, but for Git, which was only 21 months when Git 1.4.4 was released, 18 months is really very *long* time ago. Dmitry -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
