Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: taglines vs explicit

[Zack Brown]

Robert Anderson said elsewhere:
|On Sat, 2003-10-04 at 11:07, Zack Brown wrote:
|> Why are you os inflamed about this? 'explicit' tagging exists as an
|> option in tla. What's the problem when someone chooses to use it?
|
|I think people are annoyed not because people want to use it, but rather
|that people who want to use it are making that decision based on
|misunderstandings about the implications of the various alternative
|choices.  The choice itself is not irritating.  What is irritating is
|when the rationale for the choice makes no sense.

It's just a matter of taste. The people who advocate 'tagline' over
'explicit' feel that it makes no sense to use 'explicit' because you can
just use 'tagline' and *pretend* you're using 'explicit' until the day
when you want the full 'tagline' features.

But it's still legitimate to decide from the start that the 'tagline'
features are undesirable. There's nothing wrong with that, and if
someone *does* make that decision, there's no reason for them to choose
'tagline' against their better judgement.

The rest of the quoted material following is from Bruce

On Sat, Oct 04, 2003 at 07:53:03PM +0100, Bruce Stephens wrote:
> Zack Brown <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > It's just strange because people have been advocating 'taglines' as
> > if there is no justification to use anything else. If that were the
> > case, why would arch support any alternatives?
> 
> No, people have been advocating using the tagline tagging method.
> Arch supports alternatives for hysterical raisins.  Tom has improved
> the configurability such that the specific tagging method doesn't make
> that much difference.
> 
> So in the tagline tagging method, you can get the same behaviour as
> with the explicit tagging method (OK, if you happen to have files
> which have taglines in them then I guess the behaviour is different).

See above. People seem to think that just because 'tagline' is a
superset of functionality, that it should therefore be preferable. It's
not true. Sometimes a superset is undesirable because the extra features
are deemed to be bad. It's a personal choice.

> > I think if you or others start using arch for the kernel, there
> > might one day be a movement to migrate from 'explicit' to
> > 'taglines', and then that will be difficult. But I'm sure a way will
> > be found when the time comes.
> 
> That's my worry (and which tagging method you choose doesn't help that
> much).  That's why I think the current implementation of explicit tags
> is wrong: the mapping between tags and filenames should be in a file
> somewhere, and that should be manipulated by "tla move", etc.
> taglines in files then become an automatic way of working out
> sequences of "tla move", etc., commands.  But underneath, everything
> stays consistent.  Then to convert, you just need to find out what tag
> tla has chosen for a file, and stick it into a tagline
> comment---something which could easily be scripted.

That's interesting. I definitely think it would be great if people could
start off with 'explicit', change their mind later, and switch to
'tagline'. I just don't think it's stupid of them to choose 'explicit'
from the start, if they're not yet convinced 'tagline' is better.

Be well,
Zack

> 
> [...]
> 
> 
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-- 
Zack Brown