[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 7"""
 date="2016-10-05T20:29:56Z"
 content="""
I've made V3 repositories be supported to use without an upgrade, so
that fixes the specific case this bug report was filed about.

----

I do not, however, want to commit to git-annex supporting use of all past
repo versions without an upgrade process. The point of the upgrade process
is to keep code complication down. 

All the code that knows about V1 is in Upgrade.V1, and the rest of
git-annex does not need to check the repo version when doing things
with annex objects in order to support the different V1 location. 
Supporting accessing content from V1 repositories without an upgrade would
lose this clean separation and complicate an unknown number of places in
git-annex. And any of those places that would have to include a check to
handle V1 would be liable to break as the code was changed, without anyone
except the rare V1 user likely to notice.

V1 was the last upgrade to change the locations of annexed objects, and
there's now the tuning interface that might be used for such future
location changes, but that's not the only kind of change that an upgrade
might deal with, and making a commitment that all future versions of
git-annex will support getting annexed objects from V5 (and V6 and V3)
would really narrow down the kinds of changes that could ever be made to
the git annex repository format, and I don't want to do that.

Supporting upgrades from all past versions is sufficient for future
proofing. It doesn't guarantee super easy use of an old repo from some old
version of git-annex. 

... You might have to copy it from its original rusty
media to some tiny corner of a far-future storage crystal, in order for
git-annex to be able to write to the repository when it upgrades to V7
without disturbing the original rusty media.

.. And git-annex may need to do arbitrary amounts of work, since V7 turned
out to also entail a switch from the broken-in-2100 SHA2 to a new
quantum-computer-safe hash. 

.. And git may also need to do similar work to upgrade the old repository
from the (broken-in-2010) SHA1 to its new hash. (Hopefully git will support
upgrading from old repo versions at least as well as git-annex does!)

The important thing is to have a upgrade path that is guaranteed to
be supported all the way into the future, and I've made the best choices I
can to ensure that.
"""]]