Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Making microbranches popular

[Aaron Bentley]

On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 08:06, David Allouche wrote:

> 
> Okay, so we can use "convenience aliases" which are aliases to any arch
> package name, either version, branch, or revision. For example
> "linux-2.16ac" could be alias for "linux--ac--2.16".
> 
> At argument parsing time, the CLI would check package parameters against
> existing convenience names and subsitute them if and only if there is a
> full-word match.

Actually, my plan for aliases was to leverage environment variable
substitution, so

aba get --link !tom
is converted to
--link $tom
which then turns into
--link address@hidden/tla--devo--1.2

So there needs to be a leading character, though ! is pretty well an
arbitrary choice.

Also, I was intending to allow alias expansion for any argument, not
just package/version names.

> 
> Any of those. 
> 
> Maybe the convenience alias names could be restricted to not contain
> "--", so it would be possible to relax the "full word match" rule into a
> "match between start of word and --".
> 
> That would allow using linux-2.16--patch-42 to refer to a specific
> patch, because linux-2.16ac is alias for a version.

I think you mean "linux-2.16ac--patch-42".

But this is possible without new rules too:
get !linux2.16ac--patch-42

One issue where I think we see differently is that I envisioned aliases
as a per-user setting, and this discussion seems to be about a
distributed form of aliasing.

Distributed aliasing makes it even more important for the user to
request alias expansion, since packages may add aliases that conflict
with the names of other packages.

> 
> Note that I says "aba" and not "tla" because this convenience feature
> should be protoped on aba first and later get in tla if it is deemed
> useful. There is no need to alter the core implementation to support it.

I should have something that does my form of aliasing in the next week,
but if anyone wants to give me a patch, I'll gratefully accept it.

Aaron
-- 
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
PanoMetrics, Inc.