[Docutils-develop] Re: Development strategy

[Felix W. <Fel...@gm...>]

Replying to some technical details separately:

David Goodger wrote:

>    Optionally, we can declare that Docutils 0.4.x:
>
>    * is the last version that will support Python 2.1 (and perhaps
>      higher?)

+1.  I'm not sure about whether to drop Python 2.2 support.  We should
probably ask on Docutils-users later what compatibility requirements
people have.

>    * is the last version that will support Netscape Navigator 4

We don't fully support NN4 at the moment, but the removal of the name
attributes will make it the HTML output even less usable with NN4, so
+1 on officially dropping NN4 support after 0.4.

> * We can offer multiple snapshots: [...]
>
>   All we'll need is a change to the docutils-update script, to make it
>   more general.

Shouldn't be difficult, I suppose.

> [This may be a good opportunity to rewrite it (or its core) in Python;

I don't think that will make it more legible.  It calls so many programs
and does so excessive piping that Python would probably a bad choice.

> the current shell script code is becoming difficult to understand due
> to its length.]

We can probably remove some code.  E.g. the sitemap code does not give
enough benefit to justify the maintenance efforts and CPU cycles.

> * Regarding branching, Felix wrote that "Subversion's **branching
>   support** is bad."  But ISTR that branch support was one of the main
>   reasons we switched from CVS to SVN.  Is my memory faulty?

No -- but CVS' branching support is even worse.  :-)

>   I think the branching support in SVN is good enough.

Well, yes, it should be usable.

>   If SVN's branch support proves to be inadequate, then we'll consider
>   changing repository software.  We [1]_ have done it once, and we
>   [2]_ can do it again.  Bazaar-NG looks promising.

Didn't know of it before; it certainly looks promising.

>   I recently learned about SVK

Same for SVK.  It seems to have improved; last time I checked it was
quite messy.

Anyway, currently we don't need all that...  Subversion's fine for now.

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