Re: [Gnu-arch-users] GNU Arch review - am I accurate?

[Jan Hudec]

On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 22:52:36 +0000, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-03-03 at 01:07, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> > > There are some things I didn't see:
> > > * Is anyone currently working on automated caching?
> > 
> > Of course -- Arch has automated caching build in. See "revision
> > libraries", archive mirrors and cacherevs. There've been some folks
> > proposing caching other files as well, but such proposals typically add
> > nothing revlibs don't do already.
> > 
> > > * Is it even slightly plausible to change the default
> > >   filename/tagname conventions so arch will
> > >   work more easily with common tools (e.g., vi/vim, more, csh,
> > >   bash, Windows (it doesn't handle long names well))?
> > >   Conventions are so arbitrary, yet the ones arch uses
> > >   seem designed to cause unnecessary problems.
> > 
> > Go read the archives. This has been rehashed time and time again
> 
> Any suggestions on keywords to search for?
> Searches for "naming convention" and such don't see to pull
> that sort of thing.
> 
> 
> > -- but
> > folks who actually try to use Arch for a while (myself included) tend to
> > appreciate the conventions as they stand.
> 
> My problem isn't with conventions per se, it's that the
> default conventions interfere with some common tools.
> So, are there conventions that could be used instead?
> 
> Several have commented that they want the marker character
> first, so that they sort specially.  Frankly, I don't know
> if that's such a great idea - if you want them at the beginning,
> you could use capitals letters or whatever.  But okay, if
> that's important let's look for a different character that
> can be used at the beginning of a filename.  Most characters
> have some sort of problem, but here are a few candidates:
> ^ this was the old Unix pipe symbol before |, but almost no
>   system accepts that as a pipe anymore.  Works on Windows.
>   On some shells (like C shell), you'd have to prefix with ./
>   to execute it, but since people's PATH shouldn't include "."
>   that would be true anyway.

Obviously, it's not just execution (start of first word), but start of
any word. It however is a GLOBBING CHAR for zsh.

> % This is an argument prefix on Windows (e.g., %1), so it
>   may be problematic on Windows systems.
> @ This is used for email and in URLs to identify usernames.
>   Still, it's not a bad idea.

But it's definitely a regular character for ALL tools, except
brain-damaged bash completion (bash completion must only complete the
part after @ once it's entered).

> _ It looks like "-", which gives the risk of typing the wrong one,
>   but it seems to work very well.

Yes, that 

> So at least ^ seems to be easy to use,

For me, it definitely does not. It's a globing char, so it's worse than
+

> and address@hidden are plausible as well.
> Windows XP doesn't barf on any of those characters as a leading character.

They seem to be. I usualy use `@' for junk files, because make chokes on
files containing `,' and `:'.

> 
> > Making a practice of changing longstanding conventions easily is also
> > not a friendly thing to do with software in production usage.
> 
> On THAT we agree!  But that can be handled by just
> making sure that the regex'es for tagging include the
> "original" and "new" convention.  If it affects
> the internals, modify the code slightly so
> it can handle the old and new ways too
> ("look for new way, then look for old way, THEN declare it's not there").
> 
> For naming conventions, I think that

The regexps can be customized for each project as you like. Change them
as you wish (if you use aba, the init-tree command will copy
~/.arch-params/=tagging-method for you).

In addition, tla itself needs:
- Prefix for the log file: Since tla make-log returns full path,
  any-editor $(tla make-log)
  works correctly. Actualy, I always do "vi +ArchLog" anyway.
- Prefix for the temporary junk. Since comma is not special for shell
  and only thing you need to do with tla's temps is delete them, there
  is no problem.
- Name for the arch directory. {arch} has a nice feature of sorting
  after anything else (only |, } and ~ sort after {). Since one seldom
  needs to work with files there manualy, I can live with typing extra
  \ time to time (in addition, in bash {<Tab> completes correctly to
  \{arch\})

So I suggest putting a summary on the Wiki, but don't think it's worth
the effort to change arch. Perhaps change the default =tagging-method
that is generated for new projects.
(or better, make tla use ~/.arch-params/=tagging-method if it exists).

> --- David A. Wheeler <address@hidden>
> 
> 
> 
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> 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec 
<address@hidden>

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