[Gnu-arch-users] Re: talk amongst yourselves: "iterated" operations over configs

[Robert Anderson]

On Mon, 2003-09-15 at 22:33, Miles Bader wrote:
> Robert Anderson <address@hidden> writes:
> > tla catcfg | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -n1 -i tla what-changed --dir
> > 
> > There's quite a few commands which could be "iterated" like this over
> > the project trees in a config.  I think it's worth thinking about a way
> > of trying to systematize such operations and build them into the cli.
> > 
> > My first guess at a decent cli is to provide an argument analogous to
> > the usual --dir argument; I guess --config is the most obvious choice.
> 
> I agree that this is worth improving, but I'm not sure what your
> suggestion is; do you mean that --config would take a config argument
> (like build-config does), and apply that config similar to the pipeline
> you suggested above?

Yes, analogous to the --dir argument as I said.

Explicitly:

% tla what-changed --config emf.net/devo.tla


> I think that would be annoying since it would require you to always
> specify the config.

As opposed to what?  That seems like precisely the point of the command:
"iterate over config X".

> In my current usage, I've used Tom's config to make my tla source tree,
> but I don't really want to use the original config after that, because
> I've replaced parts of the tree with my own.

Then specify whatever config you want to iterate over.  Seems pretty
straightforward.

> Because of this I use a similar, but crucially different, pipeline:
> 
>    tla inventory --trees --nested | xargs -n1 tla CMD --dir

Well, as you said, this is different.  This is 'iterate on all nested
trees' not 'iterate on trees listed in this config.'

I think they are both potentially useful, but I think since configs are
an arch-supplied mechanism, it makes sense to support them natively
before working on "other iterated things you might often do."

> For this particular usage, a similar `--nested' option would be very
> convenient, e.g., the above would be replaced by:
> 
>    tla CMD --nested
> 
> As for --config, well, I'm not yet a willing user, so I'll leave that
> to others, but it does seem like it would be annoying to have to keep
> track of the config; maybe if build-config stashed away the config name
> in {arch}/=current-config it could be read by --config or something...

I'm not sure what you mean by 'keep track of the config.'  What's to
keep track of?

Bob