[Gnu-arch-users] Registered and official names

[Aaron Bentley]

Archives have One True Name, stored in their meta-info.  But you can 
register them using any arbitrary name.  We do this so that we can 
register two copies of an archive; the true location and a mirror.

The question: is what commands should accept registered names?  Tom's 
suggested that tla commit foo-SOURCE/bar should work.  That implies 
other write commands like archive-setup, tag and import should also work.

What about using registered names for the read side?  Currently, "tla 
tag foo-MIRROR/version foo/version" succeeds, but will do the wrong 
thing, writing the registered name to the CONTINUATION file and logs. 
Also, it erronously caches a revision.

Personally, I'm not thrilled that we need two names for archives, but I 
don't see an alternative.  However, if we had read caching, we wouldn't 
need local mirrors.  That would reduce the need to write to registered 
names, and we could just mandate the use of official names everywhere 
(except archive-mirror).  We'd lose the potentially-useful "tla tag 
foo-SOURCE ...", but it's probably not that useful anyhow, or someone 
would have fixed it.

Aaron