Folks,

With David has recently made some new patches to enable the darcs-2
format by default.  I have reviewed the patches, and feel that they are
both straightforward and correct.

So: I am now leaning very strongly making the switchover *now*, that is
for the upcoming release instead of waiting till 2009.  What this means
is that

 * the next release in (early October) will be darcs 2.1.0
 * darcs init will create darcs-2 repositories by default
 
Note that users will still be able to force old format repositories with
init --old-fashioned-inventory and --hashed

The next pre-release will arrive tomorrow morning (around 07:00 UTC).
In the meantime, you are encouraged to yell at me if you think this
decision is potentially unwise.  Note also that I am using
http://code.haskell.org/darcs/2.0.3 as a temporary release branch

Thanks,

Eric

Reasons to perform the switch now:
 * the darcs2 format is better than darcs1, and users would avoid
   running into the exponential merge issue
 * knowing that other people will be forced to upgrade anyway makes it
   easier for people to switch formats
 * this new code was straightforward and 'small' enough and we still
   have two weeks of testing before we make an actual release
 * this will encourage packagers to get darcs 2 into people's hands
   as soon as possible
 * as a representative subset of users, Ubuntu will soon be coming out
   with a release shortly that includes some version of darcs 2
 
Reasons to delay the switch till the next release:
 * darcs2 is not yet packaged for everybody, so forcing this
   kind of upgrade may be obnoxious
 * the code may be straightforward, but it is not well tested and
   does not correspond to any of our release critical bugs...


-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9

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