Re: [Gnu-arch-users] abrowse and rbrowse (what rbrowse has that abrowse doesn't)

[James Blackwell]

I'm confused. Are you worried that somebody is going to take abrowse
away from you and replace it with a tool that doesn't work quite as
good? If so, don't worry. abrowse isn't going anywhere in the near
future.  abrowse and rbrowse can *happily* co-exist for an eternity, 

The usefulness of rbrowse doesn't become really apparent until you're
either hunting for a specific patch, or you've got a lot of
categories/branches/versions to weed through. Here's some uses for
rbrowse (some of which I've used):

tla rbrowse --all ^tla--.*  | show every tla category in every archive
                            | you have registered (useful with snaps)
                            |
tla rbrowse --1\.2\.1--     | show all of my categorys and branches for
                            | my locally named 1.2.1
                            |
tla rbrowse \               | show all patches in the address@hidden 
  -A address@hidden \   | archive which has "ascii" in the
  --patch-regex ascii       | description
                            |
tla rbrowse \               | show all patches that have the word
   --patch-regex delta  \   | that have "delta" in them with a category
   \(^|--\)tla                | or branch that starts with the subphrase
                            | "tla" (untested)

I can even do a "tla rbrowse -A address@hidden -D --patch-regex miles",
and see that Tom last credited you with a patch on January 9th, 2004. 

As far as I know, there is only one thing that abrowse knows how to do
that rbrowse doesn't; namely, list merges.

The tradeoff for this is that right now rbrowse has not been refactored
yet to be as fast (both perceptually and physically) as possible 


> On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 12:14:31PM -0400, James Blackwell wrote:
>> The main differences between abrowse and rbrowse is that abrowse offers
>> limiting via a LIMIT interface, and rbrowse limits by using a regular
>> expression interface. 
>
> Hmmm, sorry.  Perhaps I interpreted the help message, which says:
>
>    usage: tla rbrowse [options] [LIMIT REGEX]
>
> That makes look like it accepts two optional arguments, a LIMIT and a REGEX.
> I take it you're saying it's actually `[LIMIT_REGEX]'?
>
>> > abrowse can be much faster if you're listing a slow remote archive, and
>> > specify a particular category/branch.  The reason is that abrowse only
>> > accesses the category/branch you specify, but rbrowse -- to best of my
>> > knowledge (based on observation, not reading the code) -- fetches
>> > everything and then only prints what matches.
>> 
>> Though there was a problem, it was fixed months ago. Both commands
>> actually run in the same time. These days, if you time both abrowse and
>> rbrowse from start to finish, you should end up with the same timing.
>
> Hmmm, I did a few informal tests when I sent that message, and the rbrowse
> seemed much slower (with my very slow dialup connection).  So does this
> means there's a bug somewhere?
>
>> > rbrowse could be optimized to use abrowse-style behavior when a limit is
>> > specified, and then should be as fast as abrowse in that case, but it
>> > hasn't been done yet.
>> 
>> Pardon? Why would you want to replace regexes with limits? The point to
>> rbrowse is to replace limits with regexes.
>
> Sorry, the description of rbrowse having a `LIMIT' arg was based on my
> misreading of the help (see above).
>
> However (with the current implementation at least) the use of regexps can
> lead to some inconvenient behavior compared with limits.  E.g.:
>
>  (1) They currently don't seem to be anchored in any way, so doing `rbrowse
>      foo' will actually list categories `foo', `foo-bar', branche names
>      matching `foo', etc.  Since I think its a very common to want to simply
>      list the contents of a particular category, and it's also common to have
>      several categories with the similar names (foo, foo-tests, etc), this
>      can be annoying.
>
>  (2) abrowse will automatically use the given LIMIT to select the correct
>      archive, but with rbrowse you have to use the -A option to make it
>      search something other than your default archive.
>
>      E.g., my default archive is address@hidden'.  If I want to
>      browse in address@hidden/tla-tools', I can do:
>
>       tla abrowse address@hidden/tla-tools
>
>      but an equivalent rbrowse command yields no output, which is pretty
>      counter-intuitive.
>
>      This could _probably_ be fixed by some judicious pre-archive-scan
>      handling of the regexp, e.g., if the regexp contains a `/', match
>      against the archive-list first, but the free-form nature of regexps make
>      this hard to do in an entirely clean manner.
>
> I think the nicest solution to problems like the above would be to use
> regexps that had domain-specific alterations, e.g., `.' would only match
> inside components, and would not span `/', `--', etc., and make matches
> always anchored by default, e.g. `foo' would only match `foo' and you'd have
> to use `foo.*' to match `foo-bar'.
>
>> > [BTW, I notice that abrowse and rbrowse use different amounts of
>> >  indentation; perhaps this should be made consistent, in case somebody's
>> >  tools are keying off indentation level?]
>> 
>> Rbrowse's indentation looks the same to me as the rest of tla.
>
> rbrowse uses 3 spaces per level of indent, abrowse uses 2.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Miles
> -- 
> "1971 pickup truck; will trade for guns"
>
>
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>


-- 
James Blackwell          Please do not send me carbon copies of mailing
Smile more!              list posts. Such mail is unsolicited. Thank you!

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