#10594: Upgrade Mercurial to 1.8.x
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Reporter: ryan | Owner: tbd
Type: enhancement | Status: needs_review
Priority: major | Milestone: sage-4.7.1
Component: packages | Resolution:
Keywords: mercurial upgrade sd31 | Work_issues:
Upstream: N/A | Reviewer: Dan Drake
Author: Ryan Grout, Keshav Kini | Merged:
Dependencies: |
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Comment(by kini):
Replying to [comment:19 jdemeyer]:
> Replying to [comment:17 kini]:
> > Do we really need a compelling reason to upgrade packages we ship,
when possible?
>
> I think we do, I don't think we should simply upgrade packages for the
sake of upgrading. I think the incompatibility with older versions of
Mercurial is a negative point for upgrading Mercurial. Only if there is a
particular feature of Mercurial 1.8.4 which is really useful, then I think
we should upgrade.
This is not a backwards-incompatible change in 1.7 -- it is a forward-
incompatibility in 1.6.x. In the current state of affairs, the sage
scripts cannot properly handle packages created by the user's system
Mercurial, for many users whose system Mercurial is "too new" for Sage
(and this proportion will only increase with time). If we upgrade
Mercurial in Sage, the user's system Mercurial may not be able to handle
packages created by the sage scripts, but this is not a problem because in
those cases the user can do `echo alias hg="sage -hg" >> ~/.bashrc` and go
on with their life. The proportion of users for which this will be a
problem will only decrease with time. Also, rather than being an
inconvenience, this will actually improve the user's life, since they have
access to a newer version of Mercurial than they would otherwise. If we
''don't'' upgrade, we run into situations where you need to clone an
entire repository with `--config format.dotencode=False` before you can
run Sage's packaging tools on it, because they all use Sage's Mercurial.
The proportion of users who encounter this problem will only ''increase''
with time, and I suspect that developers (i.e. the usual users of
Mercurial) number in this population with more likelihood than average
users.
So upgrading Mercurial would help more than it would hurt. But even if it
helped exactly as much as it hurt in terms of this repository format
issue, software isn't perfect. Newer versions fix bugs that existed in
older versions. While newer versions may include new bugs, those too will
be fixed in the future. Sitting tight on an old version of software is not
safer than following the latest stable releases. I'm not advocating
updating to bleeding-edge nightly builds or anything; 1.8.4 was released
on June 1 and will be the final bugfix release before the feature release
1.9 (which will be released on July 1, according to Mercurial's release
schedule). This makes it as stable as one could like, I think.
'''edit''': yikes, let me clean out that junk from the spkg, hang on...
--
Ticket URL: <http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/10594#comment:21>
Sage <http://www.sagemath.org>
Sage: Creating a Viable Open Source Alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica,
and MATLAB
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