[isabelle-dev] Repository Trouble

[Jasmin Christian Blanchette]

Am 20.12.2012 um 21:30 schrieb Alexander Krauss:

> On 12/20/2012 12:20 AM, Alexander Krauss wrote:
> 
>> (2) The local sysadmins are working on replacement of the Mercurial
>> 2.4 from SuSE 12.2, which is potentially the cause problems here.
> 
> Replacement with what? Going to an older version is no solution in the
> long run.

Skipping a version can be a good solution in the long run. If the bug is in Mercurial, then chances are that other people will start reporting similar bugs to the Mercurial mailing list, that the maintainers will take the bug reports seriously, and then fix the issue in 2.5 or 2.6. [*]

If the bug is in elsewhere (e.g. NFS), then going back to an older version of Mercurial is likely to have no effect, and we're going to see the same failures again, giving us more information. (If failures go away, there's also the possibility that the bug is in NFS but is triggered by some new pattern of file system usage in Mercurial 2.4. That's harder to debug.)

Jasmin

[*] In fact, I've been successfully applying the policy of skipping many versions of most of the software I use. This exposes me over time to fewer bugs, and the bugs I'm exposed to I get to know better and work around.