Bug#784019: freeciv: removal of bz2 support => inability to load old savegames?

[Markus Koschany]

On 02.05.2015 17:43, Marko Lindqvist wrote:
> On 2 May 2015 at 17:56, Markus Koschany <apo at gambaru.de> wrote:
>>  only old savegames are affected.
> 
> I think this (the word 'only') is the point we disagree about. Are you
> going to document it so that "User should not upgrade from Jessie to
> Stretch before finishing current games of Freeciv." (or at least to
> load latest save in Jessie, switch compresstype, and save it again).

I think it could be mentioned in a Debian NEWS file and in
README.Debian. The problem is that not only the last savegame before the
switch is affected but all savegames. In my opinion it is unavoidable
that users have to manually decompress old savegames and convert them
into another format somewhere in the future, except you assume that all
compression formats will be around forever. Assuming human interaction
is reasonable in this case. What about savegames from 2.2, 2.3 and so
on, they all need to be converted by hand but that shouldn't be too
difficult.

>  If you want to take quicker route to obsoleting .bz2 than upstream, I
> would recommend patching so that .xz will be the default compression
> format for new savegames now on -> users upgrading from Stretch to
> Stretch+1 won't be affected if Stretch+1 drops .bz2 support. I'm going
> to submit such a patch to upstream patch tracker in near future, which
> you could just backport.

I will revert this change because it is not worth the trouble. I suggest
that you

a) deprecate bz2 as soon as possible
b) make xz compression the new default
c) improve the error handling with savegame compression formats which
are not supported by the engine and display a message to users to
manually convert to available formats

Markus


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