[Monotone-devel] compatibility woes

[graydon hoare]

hi,

two things I need to point out wrt compatibility, because they are
somewhat important:

  1. fedora core 1 and debian both have toolchain bugs related to
     static linking; having discussed this with the maintainers I am
     increasingly thinking they wish to not support any concept of
     static linking at all, in the future. the implication is that the
     glibc API is "more stable" than the kernel ABI (amazingly) and
     glibc continues to do NSS-related dlopen()'s for many functions,
     so there seems really to be no point to fighting this issue any
     further. I will stop doing fully-static builds shortly, and move
     to mixed builds (keeping lib3rdparty.a, but dynamically linking
     to libc). I haven't decided how to handle the non-header parts of
     boost yet, but perhaps they can be folded into our sources.

     I'm very annoyed by this, but there doesn't seem to be much else
     I can do.

  2. the change in rename cert format (for i18n) recently was
     ill-thought-out on my part. I should have chosen a new name for
     the new format, the result is that old certs break new code and
     vice versa. old certs need to be deleted and re-issued, and old
     monotone versions are effectively incompatible if you've done any
     renames in your repository.

     I have done this on my own tree and my own depot; if you are
     tracking monotone, the easiest thing to do is just delete your
     database and re-fetch from my depot. if you have built your own
     depots and applied renames to files in them, you will need to
     re-issue your rename certs, which is somewhat involved in this
     case. I hope nobody had the misfortune of doing so yet; if you
     did contact me and I'll walk you through it.

     I'm very sorry, this should not have happened; hopefully we're
     still young and small enough that nobody got seriously burned.

-graydon