Re: [Gnu-arch-users] archive order?

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Maksim Lin <address@hidden>

    >  From my understanding, the archive keeps the base "prisitine" source 
    > version and then just accumalates changesets as tgz files and if I do a 
    > get of the latest 'head' revision, it will fetch the base source then 
    > apply all the patches it has over the top to get me the latest revsion 
    > in my working dir.

That's true only if:

(a) you don't have a revision library for this source
(b) the archive maintainer hasn't archive-cached any revisions


    > My question is: since most of the time you actually want the latest 
    > revision and then sometime (less often) you want to grab some older 
    > historical revision, why doesn't the archive actually keep an up to date 
    > (ie latest revsion) copy of the src and then just apply the changesets 
    > "backwards" to get older revisions?
    > Does that make sense or do I have things backwards?


It makes sense.  Archive-caching and revision libraries give
essentially the same effect as the optimization your asking about.

The "minimalist archive" (just the bases, tags, and changesets) you
could think of as just a transaction log -- ancillary structures like
archive caching and rev-libs give you a flexible array of options for
performance tuning after that.

-t