[Gnu-arch-users] Re: tagline robustness

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Miles Bader <address@hidden>

    > Why?  I think the current number of arch users is fairly small,
    > and dominated by people who understand arch quite well.  Those
    > are the sort of people that would know well not to ever screw
    > with taglines, and would likely be able to deal with any
    > problems that did occur.


The current number of arch users includes people who have been using
it for a long while and who are busy doing serious work well outside
of the stuff you read about on the mailing lists or /. or whatever.

Sorry -- but it's not _that_ hard to hack conservatively here and I'm
not interested in not doing so.


    > However my impression is that more big projects are looking at
    > arch recently, and that the user-base is likely to change in
    > character pretty drastically (not to mention the effect of a
    > simple numeric increase in users).

I think that a good rule of thumb, one I've picked up while hacking
arch, is that intuitions about "what _has_ to change" before arch [or
any other project] "takes off _big_time_" in the free software
community are worth, approximately, the cost of their transmission
from the mail account on my ISP's machine to the mail account my own
machine.



    > [Throw enough monkeys at the problem and ...]
    > 
    > > An additional problem to worry about is the interaction between
    > > changeset created by versions of tla that have the change you propose
    > > and versions of tla that do not.    It would be best if changesets
    > > formed using the new rule have a form that reliably forces older
    > > versions of tla to choke on them.

    > Well that would be the _safest_ way.  

Yup.  So, those are the kinds of patches I'm interested in.



-t