[Gnu-arch-users] Re: may I pick your brains?

[Samuel Tardieu]

>>>>> "Tom" == Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

> By way of generating "raw materials" to edit into being that web
> site: what are the 5 most important things to say about arch up
> front?

Some of the important (for me) characteristics off the top of my head:
(many of them coming from discussions on this list, ordered by
decreasing personal preference)

  - branching is a natural operation[1]
  - branch reconciliation is an easy and natural operation, as GNU
    arch remembers what patches have been merged and what patches have
    not
  - allow disconnected operations (by mean of painless branching and
    mirrors)
  - nice with incremental backups
  - only transfer minimal information for an update
  - no unreliable or complicated storage format
  - signed archives using industry standard formats (OpenPGP)

Now, I want to take advantage of your question to point out some of
the things I like less about GNU arch:

  - no consistent command-line interface
  - no consistent documentation[2]
  - no support for filenames with spaces in them
  - multiplicity of commands (I have even seen Tom forget some of
    them, "whereis-archive" if I remember correctly)

 Sam

Notes: 
[1] When I try to convince people to use Arch or Darcs (I use both of
    them heavily), I have quite a hard time explaining that because
    they always start with "I don't need branches". It takes efforts
    to explain them why branching is not a awkward operation and is
    natural in software development.
[2] This is easier in Darcs where literate programming is used and
    documentation sits near the code it describes.
-- 
Samuel Tardieu -- address@hidden -- http://www.rfc1149.net/sam