Re: Poll: personal convenience vs. global improvement of docs
On Fri, May 26, 2006 at 11:35:59AM +0200, Stephan Seitz wrote:
> On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 08:42:05AM -0700, William Yardley wrote:
> > re: parsing / updating older config files - true, but you only really
> > need to update the config file once.
> No, users may omit some versions (e.g. go from 1.0 to 1.4), or users
> may test version 1.4, the config file will be migrated, the user goes
> back to 1.2, which has to handle now a too modern config file.
>
> I don't think writing and maintaining such code is worth the trouble.
I haven't checked the actual code, but I think most programs probably
just put a version number in the config files (Pine has
"last-version-used=x.xx") and just checks that. If the user somehow
fudges that up, the program will just complain that there are invalid
config variables.
Anyway, I'm not debating that it might be a hassle... but I don't think
you'd need to check the whole config file every time.
Dealing with a user going backwards a version is the thing I was
thinking about as being a big problem - that would be a tricky case to
deal with (I guess you could take all the variables you know about and
then generate a new blank config, saving the old one for reference).
Anyway, other programs seem to manage to do it successfully...
w