On Fri, Apr 25, 2025 at 12:58 AM Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Elijah Newren <newren@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > > >> The fast-export stream produced by the code with d9cb0e6f > >> (fast-export, fast-import: add support for signed-commits, > >> 2025-03-10) used to identify a signature algorithm "sha1", but this > >> new version of fast-import lost the support for it, and will barf > >> when seeing such an existing fast-export stream? I am not sure what > >> is going on around this code. > >> > >> I am not so worried about the other case, where the stream produced > >> by fast-export contained in this version may or may not be readable > >> by an older version of fast-import. > > > > I certainly can't answer anything here as I know little about > > signatures, but your comment brought up a different question for me: > > Given that d9cb0e6ff8b3 (fast-export, fast-import: add support for > > signed-commits, 2025-03-10) isn't part of any release (not even a > > release candidate), do we need to have backward compatibility with > > that version? > > I think we will lose all the credibility if we said "that's not in > an official release, so we are free to break early adopters", once > something is in 'master'. I agree that we should have at least said in big letters that the improved support for signed commits in fast-export/import is very experimental and very likely to change in the future. We could still do so. This could give us a bit of time and flexibility until we agree on and implement something better and backward compatible. (Hopefully the v2 will help us move forward.) > As some corp environment are know to run > 'next' and indeed we do encourage more folks to do so so that we can > catch breakages before they escape to 'master', I actually am equally > worried about things in 'next'. Yeah, right. On the other hand I think it's fair for us to experiment in some areas, at least when we document that we are experimenting, which means that running 'master' or 'next' and blindly using any feature we have just added is not the right thing to do if people don't want to be exposed to not just bugs but also some possible backward incompatibilities in some areas. So yeah, we should definitely have said that we are experimenting. Let me know if you want me to prepare a patch to add such wordings on top of d9cb0e6f (fast-export, fast-import: add support for signed-commits, 2025-03-10). Otherwise we will have to be backward compatible, which is not ideal, but might not be a very big issue either.
