Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: tagline considered harmful?

[Jan Hudec]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2003 at 05:35:04PM -0700, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 23, 2003 at 01:55:16PM -0800, Ethan Benson wrote:
> >>> Having read in the tla docs that tagline is the recommended tagging 
> >>> method, I'm wondering what the compelling reasons for using it are?
> >>
> >>I don't have to use special tools to move a file -- `mv' works fine.
> >>Same for removing a file.
> >
> >unless the file is of a type incompatible with tagline, if you have
> >those then you must remember which ones are using tagline and which
> >ones don't before doing a move.
> 
> I was reading Eric Raymonds new book "The Art of Unix Programming" and
> one interesting fact leapt out at me:  you CAN tag PNG format images.
> They have a special file format that lets you add arbitrary chunks of
> data to them, you just set a flag telling browsers that they can ignore
> the chunk safely.  And I know JPG and GIF files have text comment
> sections which could contain an arch-id: tag (I really like arch-id:
> better than arch-tag;)
> 
> Not sure what to do about tagging gzip files, but self-extracting gzip
> files are definately taggable, as they are just shell script wrappers
> around the data, and invoke gzip.  (at least, they used to be)
> 
> Tom, will you later on be supporting customized diff formats for
> individual file format types?  For instance, as a writer, I'd like to
> use "wdiff" for my writings, because it operates on a word by word
> level, which is more useful to me to see what changes I made.  I know,
> the utility to apply wdiff files as patches hasn't been developed yet,
> but if you plan to put hooks in for such a thing, I think it will be
> worth developing.  CVS and Subversion right now don't have such
> flexibility (I don't think), so there is no motive for developing a
> wpatch.

IIRC wiggle is almost there. It can do word diffs (thought probably not
apply them) and it can apply patches (in unified format) word-by-word.
It also removes the braindamage of patch, which does not have an option
to ignore already applied chunks (very good for merging).

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec 
<address@hidden>