Re: [Axiom-developer] CVS, Arch, Darcs

[David MENTRE]

Hello Tim,

Tim Daly <address@hidden> writes:

> Some of this is covered well by all of the software. I switched
> from CVS to Arch and was working with it reasonably well, although
> I got the impression that I "didn't get it" and was using it wrong.
> I eventually ran out of disk space on the machine that was hosting
> Arch (where I was a guest) so I had to take it down. 

Once again:

 - use Arch on your local machine, with a lot of free disk space;

 - make a mirror of your local Arch archive to the axiom-developer.org
   server.


To give figures, for about 100Ko of compressed sources (per release):

 - my local arch tree where I work takes 20 MBytes;

 - the local Arch repository is about 4 MBytes (for about 200 releases);

 - the remote Arch repository is also of about 4 MBytes.
 

[...]
> Methinks the world needs a new kind of person, a "project librarian",
> who has the job of building and maintaining meta-projects by contacting
> and working with other librarians. The complexity of maintaining a
> repository that holds dozens of cooperating projects makes my hair hurt.

In some sense, the people making packages in Linux distributions (like
Camm as a Debian developer) are doing exactly this: make a coherent set
from a set of sources on the Net. To attack this complexity, they are
defining policy and rules like in the Debian Policy Manual
(http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/).

Other people are doing similar things in an OS agnostic but language
specific way with GODI packaging system for OCaml software
(http://godi.ocaml-programming.de/). Once again, real people are behind
software packaging.

I cannot comment further on your proposal and certainly won't volunteer
for the job, but your long term vision is probably right. However, we
are probably a too small comunity to be able to do this right now.


Yours,
d.
-- 
David MENTRE <address@hidden> -- http://www.nongnu.org/axiom/