Re: [Gnu-arch-users] minor extension to arch protocol

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Colin Walters <address@hidden>

    > > People sometimes use the prefix "." for that purpose but, as we all
    > > know, there are more punctuation characters than that on your keyboard
    > > and the only problem here is that some authors of shells have been
    > > rather grabby about those punctuation characters, for no good reason
    > > whatsoever.

    > Yes....we could debate the virtues of shells doing this, but the fact is
    > that it's been done for a long time, 

You are rather younger than me, I infer.


    > and there are probably millions of shell installations out there
    > that aren't going to change anytime soon.

We have already seen demonstrations of upward compatible patches to,
for example bash, that fix this.

That I am a more responsive maintainer than bash maintainers is not an
excuse to bash me.


    > Look, I understand this is a relatively minor issue.  

And I understand you understand.

I'm sorry if I'm coming off as really "pissed at you" or something --
I'm not even slightly so.  You're a great contributor and I greatly
appreciate your help.  You're quite literally one of the heros of the
project as far as I'm concerned.

I'm just being direct on this particular issue and using your messages
as an excuse to rehearse to the list the reasoning here.  I know you
don't really mean to bash me and likewise, I don't mean to bash you
either.


    > But it really does
    > bother me, and has from the start.  And it's not just me; about half of
    > everyone I introduce to arch comments on it.  

Yes, I know.  From an engineering perspective, some aspects of the
explosion of interest in GNU/Linux have been destructive.  This is one
of them.


    > If we can fix tagging-method, I think there'd be many fewer
    > complaints.

I'd rather fix the problem than the symptom.


    > But an observation: It's good that the problems with arch (tla) are so
    > minor that we are debating file naming, 


Thank you!  Yes!  I've noticed that to.


    > instead of about how to handle
    > repeated merges or something...


Cheers,
-t