Saturday, March 05, 2016

[gwzfhogg] Rolling back applications and data

A package manager can help roll back an application to a previous version.

Revision control can help roll back user data to a previous version.

In between is a messy area, user data that is not strictly part of the application, but intimately tied to a particular application version, e.g., configuration, cache.  Cache can usually be deleted.

Bring some order to this messy area.  Probably enumerate the common cases and standardize behaviors.

User data could become saved in a format unreadable by an earlier version of the application.  However, if source code is available, maybe the parser can be backported or a converter can be created.  Can we standardize parsers to ease backporting, even make it automatable?

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