[Gnu-arch-users] Re: arch taglines for emacs

[Miles Bader]

Juri Linkov <address@hidden> writes:
> The better and safer if it had a form of RCS keywords ($Id$, $Header$, etc.)

It's a very different concept than RCS keywords.

RCS keywords are a form of communication from RCS to the human reader of
the source code.  Arch taglines, on the other hand, are strictly for the
use of arch (though I suppose you could choose to use them for similar
purposes in other tools).  RCS tags change (which can be a huge source
of problems).  Arch taglines _never_ -- by definition -- change.

Because taglines are meant for arch, not for the user, you also probably
don't want them in a very user-visible location; also arch only searches
for them in the first and last 1024-byte blocks of the file.  For these
reasons, the convention is to make them the last line in the source
file, or thereabouts.

You are right that a less strictly line-oriented syntax would be more
convenient (in fact such a syntax is being discussed right now on
gnu-arch-users, in case you're reading this on emacs-devel).

> If initially the user enters strings of the form $Arch$, then arch
> could assign an unique tag to it automatically.

Because arch taglines never change, they are assigned only once;
as such, I suppose you could create a tool to automatically look for
`unfilled' tags and fill them in, if you find such a method of creating
taglines convenient.

I think there are currently script available which automatically add a
tagline to every un-tagged source file they find, for files who's type
the script knows.  Because of the convention of putting taglines at the
end of the file, this probably works pretty well, and is slightly more
convenient than requiring the user to add an unfilled-in template
somewhere...

-Miles
-- 
Yo mama's so fat when she gets on an elevator it HAS to go down.