Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Documentation?

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Martin Olsen <address@hidden>

    > Hi all

    > I'm currently investigating pro and cons of different versioningsystems.

    > It seems that arch is the choice for many especially in distributed 
    > development inviroments.  I guess that one of the reasons for this is 
    > that arch, as opposed to many other systems, is changeset oriented. I 
    > would very much like to dig a bit deeper into this and has been 
    > searching the website for some further documentation on arch's 
    > architecture. But the only documentation I can find is the usermanual. 
    > Is there a document somewhere explaining the architecture of arch in 
    > more details ?

The short form:

~ the inventory layer -- assigning logical (position independent)
  names to files in a tree and distinguishing controlled from
  uncontrolled files

~ the changeset layer -- diff and patch extended for whole trees.
  Requires the inventory layer.

~ the global namespace and archive format -- a coordinate system
  for base revisions and changesets.   Requires the changeset layer.

~ patch logs -- keeping within a tree it's relationship to the 
  global namespace of changesets  Requires the namespace layer.

~ fluff -- merge commands, revlibs, and everything else are defined in
  terms of the above.  Requires all of the above.

Absent a revctl system, we'd be putting .tar.gz and diff.tar.gz files
on FTP sites and trying to keep an organized approach to managing
those.   Arch is boring -- it doesn't do anything more than automate
that.  It's just a specialized file manager.  :-)

-t