[tahoe-dev] on backward-compatibility and new features

[Brian Warner]

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn wrote:
> 
> Let me restate my use case now that you've persuaded me that  
> immutable dirs in backupdb is okay.  It's not that new features have  
> to be disabled by default, it's that:
> 
> A user wants to know if she can upgrade to the new release of Tahoe- 
> LAFS, briefly glance at the NEWS.txt file, and continue to  
> interoperate with her old-version-using friends, without  
> significantly altering her workflow.

As a data point in favor of Zooko's argument, I noticed that the GPG
folks are discussing a similar issue. They enabled support for DSA2
(i.e. DSA with >1024bit keys) over three years ago, but are just now
considering whether to make --enable-dsa2 the default (to start
generating these new keys).

http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-devel/2009-November/025433.html

cheers,
 -Brian