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Subject: Re: ketchup script and 3.0
From: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
To: Stratos Psomadakis <psomas@ece.ntua.gr>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Frank Kingswood <frank@kingswood-consulting.co.uk>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:46:12 -0500
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On Tue, 2011-06-07 at 23:32 +0300, Stratos Psomadakis wrote:
> On 06/07/2011 11:10 PM, Matt Mackall wrote:
> > On Tue, 2011-06-07 at 22:48 +0300, Stratos Psomadakis wrote:
> >> On 06/07/2011 03:53 PM, Matt Mackall wrote:
> >>> On Tue, 2011-06-07 at 08:40 +0100, Frank Kingswood wrote:
> >>>> Hi!
> >>>>
> >>>> With Linux 3.0 approaching rapidly, is the ketchup script known to work?
> >>>> It has this tempting <ver> parameter but I've always passed in "2.6" there.
> >>> It's on its third maintainer now and I've already forgotten the name of
> >>> the new guy.
> >> It's me :P
> >>
> >> I uploaded the ketchup code at github, and added some code to handle 3.x
> >> versions, but I've not tested it very much, so it's still in a separate
> >> branch. [1]
> >> You can check it out/test it, if you want. If it works without problems,
> >> when linux-3.0 gets released, I'll tag a new version of ketchup and
> >> notify distro maintainers to upgrade their packages.
> > I took a brief glance at your changes. You'll probably want to teach it
> > that 2.6.39++ == 3.0 so that people can seamlessly move back and forth
> > between the two ranges. This wasn't something that made sense across the
> > 2.4/2.6 transition.
> >
> > Oh, wait, maybe I've spotted the code for this.
> >
> > Thinking ahead just a bit, it'd be nice if we could just declare in
> > advance that 3.9++ == 4.0. If we're going to bump the major number at
> > arbitrary points, that's the most obvious one. It's approximately 3
> > years out at the current rate which seems like a good pace. Then tools
> > like ketchup and other tools that handle these version numbers could
> > just do all this once.
> >
> > Linus?
> Yeap, that would be nice, indeed. Otherwise, ketchup code (and other
> tools probably) will get uglier and uglier as major numbers advance, and
> I made it look ugly already (although this is probably 'thinking way
> into the future').

Well it can in fact be managed with a list of transition points rather
than a cascade of if statements.

But my point is that if we have adhoc transitions, we will encounter the
"fix all the scripts and websites" pain at every transition. And tools
that are managed via distros and the like can literally take years to
get into the hands of users. It'd be nice if the copy of ketchup shipped
in <enterprise distro> just worked 3 years from now because 4.0 wasn't a
surprise.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.


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