Re: [PATCH] cvsimport: rewrite to use cvsps 3.x to fix major bugs

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Michael Haggerty wrote:

> Regarding your claim that "within a few months the Perl git-cvsimport is
> going to cease even pretending to work": It might be that the old
> git-cvsimport will stop working *for people who upgrade to cvsps 3.x*.
> But it is not realistic to expect people to synchronize their git and
> cvsps version upgrades.  It is even quite possible that this or that
> Linux distribution will package incompatible versions of the two packages.

Moreover, I feel an obligation to point the following out:

In a hypothetical world where cvsps 3.x simply breaks "git cvsimport"
it is likely that some distributions would just stick to the existing
cvsps and not upgrade to 3.x.  Maybe that's a wrong choice, but that's
a choice some would make.  An even more likely outcome in that
hypothetical world is that they would ship it renamed to something
like "cvsps3" alongside the existing cvsps.  Or they could rename the
old version to "cvsps2".  If we were the last holdout, we could even
bundle it as compat/cvsps.

So please do not act as though the cvsps upgrade is a crisis that we
need to break ourselves for at threat of no longer working at all.
The threat doesn't hold water.

Luckily you have already written patches to make "git cvsimport" work
with cvsps 3.x, and through your work you are making a better
argument: "The new cvsimport + cvsps will work better, at least for
some users, than the old tool."

Just don't pretend you have the power to force a change for a less
sensible reason than that!

Hope that helps,
Jonathan