Re: [Gnu-arch-users] minor extension to arch protocol

[Colin Walters]

On Sun, 2003-11-16 at 17:37, Tom Lord wrote:
>  
> It does mean that, inside of "{arch}", the entire namespace of files
> whose names are also valid category names is available.
> 
> If "=tagging-method" were renamed "tagging-method", then what would
> happen if a project had a category named "tagging-method"?

Hm, that is a problem.  We could put the "tree archives" (not sure what
to call them) in {arch}/archives?  At this point we'd need to bump the
project tree format version.

> Another use of the same pattern is in the archive format: =meta-info.

Yeah.  But I rarely see the archive format, so I don't care too much
about it.

> People sometimes use the prefix "." for that purpose but, as we all
> know, there are more punctuation characters than that on your keyboard
> and the only problem here is that some authors of shells have been
> rather grabby about those punctuation characters, for no good reason
> whatsoever.

Yes....we could debate the virtues of shells doing this, but the fact is
that it's been done for a long time, and there are probably millions of
shell installations out there that aren't going to change anytime soon.

(Oh, and note the . is used in {arch} already, for
".arch-project-tree").  

Look, I understand this is a relatively minor issue.  But it really does
bother me, and has from the start.  And it's not just me; about half of
everyone I introduce to arch comments on it.  If we can fix
tagging-method, I think there'd be many fewer complaints.

But an observation: It's good that the problems with arch (tla) are so
minor that we are debating file naming, instead of about how to handle
repeated merges or something...

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part