Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch with 'special files'

[John Meinel]

Tom Lord wrote:
>    From: Josh England <address@hidden>
...

> That's right but I'm not in principle opposed to owner/group support
> if it is optional and clean.
>
>    Revision control doesn't apply only to source code anymore.  I've found
>    several instances of people doing exactly what I'm looking for by
>    hacking all kinds of scripts around a CVS repository.  That sounds far
>    to gruesome to me.  I'd like a clean, fully revision-controlled, linux
>    root filesystem.  Conceptually, I think this doesn't sound too hard.  Of
>    course the devil is in the details.  What do you think?
>
> I think the worst case is you wind up with roughly the same thing
> ("hacking all kinds of scripts around" an Arch archive.)   
>
> In better cases: I wouldn't be surprised if more exploration of your
> use case results in feature ideas for Arch that would reduce the need
> for such scripts.
>
> The bottom line issues are: (1) getting a clear idea of what those
> feature for core arch would be; (2) figuring out how to get them done
> given everything else going on in arch development.
>
> -t

There are two issues here. First is that since some of this information 
is going to be optional (lots of people don't want ownership enforced), 
there needs to be a way of stating what metadata is important. Second is 
having some way to keep track of the metadata that needs tracking.

For the first part, we need to discuss whether this is a per-user, 
per-project, per-file, and what the defaults are, and if it's possible 
to set a default at each level.

Since it is file metadata, the discussions about line endings and 
possibly even file-encoding (converting from/to utf-8 versus native).

I would personaly like to see something akin to our current 
tagging-method, only with a personal default. (Because it is a pain to 
edit tagging-method everytime I create a new archive).
I think it could tie in very well with our current .arch-inventory 
files, though we might want a separate file for it for focus of purpose. 
I am tempted to keep per-file information in .arch-ids, but since 
tagline files don't have a metadata file, I'm not convinced that is the 
best answer.

A lot of people don't like regex syntax for tagging-method. *I* do, 
regex kicks ass, but you have to learn it. And it has exclusion 
problems, it is easy to create a regex to include something, hard to 
exclude others.

So I would suggest the following changes, have the "categories" source, 
not-source, source-w, not-source-w

source       is a regex for including a file as source
not-source   is evalutated after a match, and specifically regects a
             match
source-w     uses shell wildcard syntax
not-source-w should be obvious

Probably better names than source, precious, backup, junk. At least 
precious should probably be something like "ignored".

Then adding new ones like track-owner, line-endings-lf, 
line-endings-crlf, line-endings-fixed, line-endings-native.
Possibly something like track-block, track-char.

I think it would be nice to have a flag in ~/.arch-params for "respect 
track-owner". So that if *I* want to see what a project that 
tracks-owner looks like, I don't have to switch to root to check it out. 
This is a weak proposal, though.

That is my beginning proposal, I need to go to the dentist, I might be 
back to propose more later.

John
=:->