Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Archives use cases

[Robert Anderson]

On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 10:32, Clark McGrew wrote:
> Both of the cases are questions about how to manage the flat arch name
> space when there are a large number of categories.

In an abstract sense, the flat name space is completely irrelevant to
how you might handle a "large number of categories."

> >From a librarian point of view, this seems like it would work, but the
> flat archive namespace seems a little problematic.

I do a lot of talks and papers as well.  What I do is I have a "talks
and papers" archive, and since most of my talks and papers are
perturbations both large and small from a previous one, I branch the
last talk or paper and begin work.  It's actually quite a nice advantage
of arch in this context.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what the problem is.  Here's a fictional
example of how I might organize things:

{TalksPapers} archive
chicago03--talk--0--base-0
chicago03--talk--0--patch-1
..
chicago03--talk--0--patch-27 

Ok, I gave the talk, now I need to submit the paper.  I'll start with
the talk, to cull some text and figures:

chicago03--talk--0--patch-27 => chicago03--paper--0-base-0

work, work.

Ok, next up: San Diego...

chicago03--talk--0--patch-27 => sandiego04--talk--0--base-0

Lather, rinse, and repeat until career over.

> The second case is how to use arch in the context of a relatively large
> physics collaboration.  A large collaboration might have several hundred
> active physicists spread around the world, and about 100 people actively
> developing software.  My guess is that this means a physics
> collaboration would be considered a moderately small software
> development project,

No, that's pretty big by just about any metric.

> Once again, arch's flat name space seems to pose a challenge.

Not at all, that I can see.

  How
> should I handle several hundred categories in a single archive.
  I
> suppose one possible solution is to break the code into multiple
> archives, but "everything in one place" is working pretty well, and I'd
> like to keep with that paradigm.

Can you please state what the problem is in specific terms?  You haven't
identified any actual problem other than "there are lots of
categories."  Why is that a problem?

Bob