Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory

[Mark A. Flacy]

>>>>> "Doran" == Doran Moppert <address@hidden> writes:
Doran> 
Doran> All I'm after is a simple explanation of the design decision: the
Doran> preexistence of the dotfiles convention and the usability issues
Doran> with common tools make it seem questionable. Yes, many of these
Doran> "common tools" may be "broken" in some sense, but when you're
Doran> talking about some of the most widely used and deployed unix shells,
Doran> the code goes back a long way and calling for behaviour changes in
Doran> bash, tcsh and whatever else is not a very productive approach.
Doran> 
Doran> Nor do I think calling for the use of `tla inventory` over `find` is
Doran> appropriate: what, should my distribution Makefiles rely on tla??
Doran> Rename {arch} to .tla and suddenly find, tar and /usr/bin/* work in
Doran> the expected way on a project directory.
Doran> 
Doran> Normally I'm not for change-for-the-sake-of-change. A good reason is
Doran> needed to defy tradition. I sense you're similarly inclined, so I'm
Doran> just curious as to why this one was broken.

Well, given that Tom *did* use some dot-files and dot-directories in
arch/tla, then he must have put some thought behind the decision.  No?

I'd say that he didn't use ".arch" because he thought it was important to
have a visual indicator of the root of a arch workspace.  IIRC (from one of
the first times this topic came up), one of the reasons that he chose the
"{arch}" name was for sorting purposes.  As an example, "{arch}" shows up at
the bottom of an Emacs dired buffer which is more-or-less out of the way.

I believe that he also used the "++" and "=" characters for similar
reasons, except that these sort to the beginning of the listing.  The use
of a leading ",," for junk is a nice idea, IMO.

>From my own experience, I know that *any* file whose name starts with "++",
"=", "{" or "," is a tla artifact.  That in and of itself can be very
useful information.  The fact that I can't autocomplete into the "{arch}"
directory doesn't bother me since I very rarely manipulate anything
contained within.

Inasmuch as I've never seen anyone else use the "{foo}" directory naming
convention for *anything*, I don't see how modifying your hypothetical
makefile find invocations to ignore the "{arch}" directory will adversely
effect "normal" operations.

-- 
 Mark A. Flacy
 Any opinions expressed above are my own.  Any facts expressed above
 are, ummm, facts.
"I'd rather feel bad than feel nothing at all." -- Warren Zevon