[Box Backup] How to move store to new machine

[Martin Ebourne]

On Sun, 2006-05-14 at 21:35 +0100, Ben Summers wrote:
> ...
> >> I'm too exhausted at the moment to freak out about the fact that I  
> >> have
> >> to upgrade my clients.
> >
> > I would, if I were you. I didn't like that either.
> 
> This decision was made to avoid releasing code which would be used in  
> an untested manner.

While I agree with the problems about testing I think it's unworkable to
not provide any kind of backwards compatibility in the future. It's just
not possible to simultaneously upgrade all clients and servers at the
same time in most situations.

I think the solution here would be to provide very limited backwards
compatibility just to ease the upgrade transition. eg. The server
supports its current and previous protocol versions, and the client just
supports its current version. This does double the amount of testing,
but also provides for the upgrade path of server first then clients. We
should be able to come up with automated tests based on the current ones
to help us with this testing.

Cheers,

Martin.