unison and protocol breakage

[Kevin Ballard]

On Feb 18, 2008, at 4:34 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> On Feb 17, 2008, at 07:36, Kevin Ballard wrote:
>
>> No, the solution here is to not do anything. Anybody using 2.13 needs
>> to upgrade if they want to work with 2.27. We are not in the business
>> of providing old port versions, and we *should not* be.
>
> Kevin, I think we are in fact in the business of providing old port  
> versions too. Where the newer version of the software is  
> incompatible in some way with the older version of the software,  
> it's reasonable to have two portfiles, if there is still demand for  
> the older version. We already have this for several software  
> packages. Consider php5 and php4; apache2, apache20 and apache; apr  
> and apr0; mysql5, mysql4 and mysql3; postgresql83, postgresql82,  
> postgresql81, postgresql80 and postgresql7; db46, db45, db44, db43,  
> db42, db41 and db3.

That's a bit different - those are specific versions as required by  
other ports (at least, if they aren't then why the hell do we still  
have Portfiles for them?). Unison is not required by other ports, and  
if it were these other ports wouldn't require a specific version.  
Therefore, we shouldn't be providing old ports because we don't have  
to maintain them for dependencies.

If the majority of committers want to say "lets provide unison 2.13",  
I will disagree, but I will not stop you.

Note: It really is fairly trivial to install unison by hand once you  
have OCaml installed. If you have a debian machine that doesn't  
provide unison 2.27, just install it manually! Seriously! It's easier  
than trying to get Unison 2.13 into MacPorts.

-Kevin Ballard

-- 
Kevin Ballard
http://kevin.sb.org
eridius at macports.org
http://www.tildesoft.com