[Gnu-arch-users] Re: File-tpye plug-in architecture for Arch?

[michael josenhans]

> The issue I see is that the current formats are standardized and widely
> available.  Introducing a plugin architecture would make it hard to know
> whether you needed additional tools to access a project.

I can not judge if this is really a threat to arch. It should be easy to 
 have test cases in place that the diff tool meets the interface 
requirements. (Patch output format is the interface.)

Interoperability requires driving for an diff output format that meets 
the need of a Arch and is tested with Arch test cases.

This applies to XML-diff formats as other diff-formats.

> Of course, this is mainly a problem for distributed development-- it
> would be easy to make sure in-house developers had all the specialized
> patch/diffs required.

Plug-ins might it make more difficult than it is today with arch. 
However I do not think that Arch can be usefully applied to any of those 
formats that are used with plugins. These are especially those formats 
written, read and modified by machines. Not by humans as is archs focus 
today.

Getting getting arch or patch file type aware and sorting out the 
requirements we need to automatic merging could be a huge bost to 
xml-diff and other special purpose diff-tools.

Using Arch with such tools would provide an increaible test bed for 
those patch tools. The tests arch can do in short time for them, people 
will likely never be able achieve during life time when using the diff 
tools manually.

Michael