Re: [Gnu-arch-users] copying archive?

[Aaron Bentley]

On Mon, 2004-02-16 at 18:11, Abraham Egnor wrote:
> I apologize for the vagueness in terminology; I'm still fairly new to
> arch.  Mirroring, as I understand it, allows a read-only (i.e. no commits
> allowed) copy of a repository to be made at a new location, but with the
> same name.  What I'd like to do is somewhat different - make a read-write
> (i.e. commits can be made) copy of a repository to a new location and with
> a new name.

What you want isn't within what arch normally does.  Changing the name
of the old archive means that you're changing history, and as Ashton
Kutcher will tell you, that can go horribly wrong.**

That's why I suggest keeping the old stuff in a write-only mirror, and
putting the new stuff in a new archive with the new name.

> Perhaps more detail about the problem would be helpful.  I'm investigating
> arch for use in a small software company of which I am an employee. 
> Currently, each developer has their own archive with their own version of
> the various projects we've been working on.  However, we'd like to create
> a new archive that has a "canonical" version of all of our projects, from
> which developers can fork their own versions as needed.  A simple way to
> do this would be to just make tags in the canonical archive from whatever
> source we decide; however, that has the disadvantage of leaving the
> revision history still in some random developer's home directory, where
> it's more likely to get accidentally nuked than if it were elsewhere.

If the developers have network access, it's easy to put the developers'
archives on a central machine.  They'll mostly use their archives when
they commit.  Their working directories would remain on their own
machines, but revision history would be centralized.

If the developers must commit when disconnected, then you can have them
mirror their archives to a central machine when they *are* connected. 
Possibly in a cron script.

Hope that helps,

Aaron

**I've been burned changing history, but I believe scripts are available
if you're determined on going this route.

-- 
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
PanoMetrics, Inc.