[Gnu-arch-users] Fai update: web page, native get, integrated lookups, better completion

[Aaron Bentley]

Hi all,

Here's a quick update on the Fai arch front-end.  It now has its own web 
page, at
http://www.sourcecontrol.net/~abentley/fai/

I'm up to revision fai--dist--0.2--patch-27 now.

Many of the changes were improvements to shell mode (which I find myself 
using all the time).  Paul Pelzl contributed improvements to the native 
get and shell completion for revisions.  With those changes in place, I 
went ahead and replaced tla's get with the native one.

I've also added automatic archive location lookup to many commands. 
This currently uses James Blackwell's mirror list, which seems to be the 
most complete.  I'd be happy to add other ones.  I implemented the 
screen-scraping based on tla-archive-locate; thanks Gergely Nagy!

I do have some thoughts on avoiding the tyranny of a centralized naming 
authority (which seems to worry James more than anyone else!).  But I'll 
save that for another email.

I also:
- Fixed the bug in PyArch that was causing Fai to die noisily when tla 
reported an error.
- Added an option to turn off looking up the latest revision in -SOURCE
- made commit complete on modified files, instead of source files

Jan Hudec contributed a portability fix for an aba command, which I've 
integrated.

That reminds me: I'm putting aba into maintenance mode.  Bug reports, 
bug fixes and sub-commands that are useful in Fai are still welcome, but 
I won't be actively developing it, since I'm no longer using it.  If 
anyone wants to take it over, let me know.

Future directions for Fai:
- Make changeset munger able to remove changes for specific files
- Support multiple aba subcommand directories
- Support colorizing and completing arguments for non-native commands
- More native commands, especially 'alias' and init
- Local options files, allowing configuration
- Template support for logs

Aaron

--
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
Panometrics, Inc.