Re: [Gnu-arch-users] tagline considered harmful?

[Miles Bader]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2003 at 11:26:16PM +1000, Maksim Lin wrote:
> So am I missing something about using taglines?

Yes:  the tagline method handles explicit tags too, so you can set your
tagging method to `tagline', and then add explicit tags for any files that
need them, and taglines for any that can use them.

That said, I've been using explicit tags for my emacs source tree, and while
it's worked reasonably well, I'm probably going to switch to taglines for all
the files, for several reasons:

 (1) The implementation of explicit tags uses quite a bit of extra disk
     space.  It uses an extra `id' file per source file, which on an ext2
     file system means _at least_ 4K extra per source file, even if the id
     tag is very small -- and this can be a substantial overhead, especially
     if your source tree contains a lot of small files [emacs is actually
     more big files, but the impact of the id files is still noticable].

 (2) The canonical emacs sources are in CVS, and will be for the forseeable
     future.  Using taglines which are part of the source files checked into
     CVS makes this a bit easier.

     For instance, if someone else creates an emacs arch archive, and later
     we find out about each other and wish to reconcile our trees in some
     manner, tagline-tagged files would make this much less painful; explicit
     tags would be a total loss -- one of us would basically have to treat
     the reconcilation as a `every file was replaced' change.

Of course the `taglines are slightly more convenient' reason applies too.

-Miles
-- 
`...the Soviet Union was sliding in to an economic collapse so comprehensive
 that in the end its factories produced not goods but bads: finished products
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