Re: [Chicken-hackers] Re: repository branching

[Peter Bex]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 08:42:59AM +0100, felix winkelmann wrote:
> >  No one is proposing that new features show up in old eggs.  Old eggs,
> >  once released, will never change.  Even serious bug fixes result in a
> >  new release, not an update to an old egg.  If you don't want upgrades,
> >  do not update your eggs.  Felix did not change this nor are we
> >  proposing that it is changed.
> 
> Sorry, I can't follow. If I install chicken on a new machine,
> and run chicken-setup, it will fetch any eggs for my particular
> major version. By updating eggs in the svn repository regardless
> of the release branch (which, If I understand correctly, you imply
> when you want to keep a single codebase for old and new
> chicken major versions and thus update a new stream-wiki
> revision in both r2 and r3) the user will get your updated code
> with the new features. Am I misunderstanding this here?

I think that's what currently happens (chicken-setup *always* installs
the latest version for your chicken release), but I think that's
also what we do not *want* to happen.

To take an example from Ruby; its rubygems are very much like eggs.
With that, you can say gem install --version 1.2.0 rails
for instance, and you get the outdated 1.2 version of Rails. At work
we still have some sites running on that version and 2.0 is
incompatible with it, so we *need* this functionality.  However, on
all systems we have the same version of Ruby itself installed, since
1.8.something has been out for ages and hasn't really changed a lot.

I think once Chicken stabilizes and more people start using we could
get the same kind of situation: eggs developing more rapidly than the
main system.  In any case, the current release system is just getting
in the way, not just in the above example but in general.  People are
confused about the layout and having as many 'trunk's per egg as you
have releases is bound to cause problems sooner or later.

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://sjamaan.ath.cx
--
"The process of preparing programs for a digital computer
 is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically
 and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic
 experience much like composing poetry or music."
                                                        -- Donald Knuth

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