[Gnu-arch-users] Re: tla configurations and recursive commands.

[Miles Bader]

Colin Walters <address@hidden> writes:
> > Yeah, Tom & Robert are constantly singing their praises, but they still seem
> > damn clunky to me (the basic idea is very elegant though...).  
> 
> I can't really think of anything better though, personally.  You need to
> break up large things (like e.g. netbsd pkgsrc) into individually
> versioned and branchable chunks, and you also typically want a way to
> create a directory hierarchy for e.g. build systems.

Well to be sure I'm halfway talking out my ass on this, since I can
never quite stomach making my own configs, and only have experience with
using others' (mostly Tom's tla).

The _idea_ of configs is nice.  It's just that in practice they add this
annoying extra layer of grot; perhaps this is due to user-interface
deficiencies, perhaps it's due to the way the configs for tla or
whatever are setup, I'm not sure.

With configs, you've got to explicitly _think about_ using configs, it's
not as natural an extension of single-tree tla usage as I think it
should be (and single-tree tla usage is in fact, really quite pleasant).

It would be _really_ nice if one could for instance, split a single-tree
into a main-tree+config'd-sub-trees, and have your existing users see
the change as, if not seamless, at least reasonably unproblematic and
not annoying.

One way might be to have a standard in-tree config, like {arch}/=config,
and have magic things happen with it -- this can never be as good as
single-tree usage because of atomicity issues, but it's perhaps possible
to define reasonable default behavior and failure modes.  At least, I
think it bears thinking about, but my recollection is that Tom
previously treated such suggestions in a, um, strongly negative
manner... :-/

[Something like pkgsrc, maybe they're might be better suited, as it
seems composed of a huge number of fairly independent components, and
it's fairly natural to deal with .]

-Miles
-- 
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.