[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Default version for star-merge (and more)

[James Blackwell]

Tom quoted me as saying:
>     > Oh. I like that idea. It works both ways and I could *easily* imagine 
>     > using that for a variety of archive names. 
>     > 
>     > Even better. Imagine *this* :
>
>     > tla star-merge jblack/t.*rbrowse
>     >  ( replacing tla star-merge address@hidden/tla--rbrowse )
>
>     > tla get lo.*4/tla--d
>     >  ( replacing tla get address@hidden/tla--devo )
>
>     > tla rbrowse lord.*/tla
>     >  ( replacing tla rbrowse address@hidden/tla )
>

I didn't get much response from others on this post, so I did some
digging around for opinions. I was able to corner Chistian Thaeter
(cehteh) and Aaron Bentley. They managed to convince me that not 
only is this a flawles solution, but there's a *much* better idea
out there.

One of their worries (one that I don't personally subscribe to) is that
allowing regexes would somehow collapse the archive name namespace.
Though arch could guarantee safe behavior by bombing out with a list if
two or more archives matched the given regex, Christian at least remains
worried.

Another, slightly more disturbing note that Aaron brought up is that
there are some subtle conflicts between the archive name format and
regular expression syntax, particularly with dots in the email address.
Essentially, novices may give an archive name along the lines of
address@hidden, without realizing that they really just said
"address@hidden(any character)com". Again, I don't think this is a real big
issue because the chances that there is both a address@hidden and a
address@hidden archive registered is remote.

But there's another, more serious, problem. In order to provide regex for 
the right hand component, arch would have to browse through all of the
archives categories, branches and versions in order to find possible
matches. This would be problematic for people that are performing
operations on remote archives.

What's more, Christian and Aaron told me of a much more interesting
idea -- version aliases. Basically, the idea goes something like this
(I'm filling in a few holes)

In .arch-params/=aliases/ one will find files with names similiar to
these: 

name:             contains:
blacky-rbrowse    address@hidden/tla--rbrowse--1.3
tladevo           address@hidden/tla--devo
lord              address@hidden
oldlord           address@hidden

This would allow things like "tla rbrowse lord", "tla get
blacky-rbrowse" and "tla star-merge tladevo"

I think they're right. This is a better idea than the regexes. This idea 
does a great job of solving one of arch's largest complaints -- way too
much typing. 

I'm more than happy to dive into the code and throw up for debate the best
two or three ways to handle this, and then implement the winner.

What do you guys say?

-- 
James Blackwell          Try something fun: For the next 24 hours, give
Smile more!              each person you meet a compliment!

GnuPG (ID 06357400) AAE4 8C76 58DA 5902 761D  247A 8A55 DA73 0635 7400