[Gnu-arch-users] designing how to kill pristine trees

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Pau Aliagas <address@hidden>

    > On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Tom Lord wrote:
    > >     > From: Pau Aliagas <address@hidden>

    > >     > If Tom would enlighten me on how to do away without pristine 
trees, I'd do 
    > >     > my best to farewell them. It sounds better than losing time in 
hardlinking 
    > >     > them, if possible.

    > > Have a look at `src/tla/libarch/local-cache.[hc]'.

    > > The vague problem statement is to implement the functions declared in
    > > the .h in such a way that they "work well".

    > At a first glimpse and applying logic, if we want to get rid of pristine 
    > trees, we have to make the revision library mandatory.

    > Is that an issue? I don't think so, we could even have a default path for
    > it if not supplied, so that the user shouldn't have to type it the first
    > time.

:-)

Yes, it is at least in the neighborhood of various issues.  We can
walk through this slowly over several messages if you really want to
work on this improvement.  I probably have a few useful
recommendations to make and, anyway, in this kind of area where the
devil is really in the details of how various decisions play out
against how a user uses his homedir, local disks, etc. --- "many
eyeballs" applied to the _design_ effort is potentially a big help.

(In other words: please think out loud on this one -- trying to keep
each increment to the design short.  And let's see how it goes.
People replying should try to keep their replies short and to the
point too.  I've changed the subject: line and started a new thread.)

A default path for the default local cache is fine.  ~/.arch-cache
perhaps[1]?  It's not obvious to me that the cache should be the same
thing as a revision library (even if they overlap in implementation)[2].

-t

[1] ~/.arch-cache rationale

    I'm assuming we agree that it goes in the homedir and should be 
    hidden.

    Why not ~/.arch-params/cache?

    Because users should be able to copy ~/.arch-params without
    copying a cache.


[2] not the same thing as `my-revision-library'

    The cache is to be semi-automagically managed to make it roughly
    space-bound yet effective as a source of handy known-good
    revisions.  A revision library is more explicitly managed to lock
    down certain revisions.  Won't users sometimes want _both_ a cache
    and a revision library? (I'm pretty sure I would.)