[Unison-hackers] a common patch set - first attempt [repost]

[Zvezdan Petkovic]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 05:33:07PM -0400, Trevor Jim wrote:
> But as I understand it, this proposal does not address
> what people are worried about, namely, the need to run
> two different versions because they don't control both
> ends, but they need some bug fix.  And, the proliferation
> of patches.

Let's split this to relevant and irrelevant.  The fact that some
distribution or packager doesn't update the port/package on time is
irrelevant to Unison developers.  It's a packager/distribution problem.
One uses Debian, let one press Debian people to update.

What is the issue though are the patches.  My point of view is as a port
maintainer.  Version 2.9.1 was extremely stable.  I compiled it, made
all the necessary patches to enable compilation under OpenBSD and you
(developers) have included them in the main unison branch.  I didn't
touch that port for couple of years.  Perfect.

This May, after the release of OpenBSD 3.7, the new port of OCaml has
been introduced to the development (current) CVS branch of OpenBSD
ports.  Unison 2.9.1 doesn't compile with that version and port was
broken.  I know, there are easy patches for that.  However, in the
meantime 2.10.2 was promoted to stable, so I decided to update the port,
rather than patch it.

It was soon clear that you (developers) recommend 2.12.0 beta so much
because of the bug fixes that I had to provide both "stable" and
"snapshot" ports.  Then I discover that I have to search mail lists to
find the patches and make both unison ports really stable.  This is very
packager unfriendly.

That's the main reason Andrew started this thread.  How can we improve
this?  Let me be clear.  I'm against maintaining old versions.  If you
want to provide beta too, fine.  Again, I think that people who choose
beta made the choice to live on the edge.  They get what they asked for.
But stable should be stable.

I just want a really stable version like 2.9.1 used to be.  If it's
going to be unison-2.14.x so be it.  Make it stable, promote it, I'll
change the port checksums, erase all the patches, and it should just
compile.  Everybody will be happy, developers and packagers.

> As a developer, I liked the old way: once a version
> goes out, it never changes.  No patches to manage.
> Every so often we declare a stable version.
> That version could be identical to the previous
> developer version, except for version number.
> This seems strictly better than your proposal
> (versions don't change underfoot).  Like your
> proposal it does not address the different-version
> interoperability issue.

That's ideal.  That's how 2.9.1 was.  But 2.10.2 is a mess.
Take a look at a shear number of patches in the port:
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/net/unison/stable/patches/

I agree that if the stable is stable we do not need to change anything.
All this conversion started because stable was very unstable.
Make a new stable, please, and make everyone's life easier.

Best regards,

	Zvezdan Petkovic