Re: [Gnu-arch-users] [MERGE REQUEST] changeset translation preparatory work

[Aaron Bentley]

Tom Lord wrote:
> "Some guy", sitting in a really ugly lab, decades ago, made up the
> dot-file convention and it happened to be a very popular idea.  Swell.
> That's hardly the last word customizable directory displays.

While it may not be the last word, it is a convention already supported 
by Arch, both in its archive format and its working tree format.  And 
actually, it looks like it may derive from hiding the . and .. directory 
entries.

http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2003-May/000473.html

In fact, my understanding is that the choice of '{', '+', '=' and ',' 
were partially motivated by their sort order in directory listings.  So 
on the one hand, Arch takes advantage of directory listing conventions, 
but when its choices are inconvenient, the answer is "change the 
conventions"?

> You want arch control dirs to be hidden?  Change the thing that's
> displaying them rather than forcing the application to change the name
> of the directory it uses.

I think you mean 'change all the things...' here.  As you note, there's 
no way to change the visibility conventions for all tools at once.  It 
wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if there are otherwise invaluable 
tools which don't support any form of customization.

And the question arises: why, exactly?  If there's a convention for 
visibility that is supported by a wide variety of tools, why is Arch the 
 one program which requires me to change the visibility conventions of 
all my tools?

Of course, all this assumes that making {arch} hidden is a worthy one. 
Personally, I think it's a quite valuable indication that the directory 
is revision-controlled, and would be sorry to see it change.

So I think a better answer is: "No.  Making control directories 
invisible is not desirable, and tla won't support it."

Aaron