RE: [Axiom-developer] patches

[Bill Page]

On August 8, 2006 4:02 AM Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
> 
> > I would like to ask the other Axiom Developers for their opinion
> > about how best to handle these sort of changes to documentation
> > in the Axiom source distribution: Should we accumulate and review
> > the changes online and only then apply a cumulative patch to Silver
> > and Gold?
> 
> I would very much like that there is only ONE version, namely 
> axiom--test--1 editable through the wiki and that version is 
> always in sync with a branch (call it silver/branches/axiom--test--1)
> on our subversion repository.

I rather dislike these weird "arch" names. Perhaps we can define
a new branch in Silver specifically for this purpose? On the other
hand having too many branches seems like the same kind of "trap"
that we got into with arch - defining branches and then no one
shows up to maintain them and no one bothers to merge them etc.
Maybe we should just sync the Silver main branch.

> Is that sync'ing easily achievable?

Yes. We could automatically do an 'svn update' every evening.
I have been thinking about how best to view the online wiki
version of the source and documentation. I believe that it
should be treated in much the same way as one would treat one's
own local copy of a repository. The only difference here is
that this online version might be edited in a collaborative
fashion. We should not think of it as "yet another repository"
but rather just the online collaborative shared version of
one of the main repositories. Using 'svn update' can be automatic
but I think we might need to take more care with 'svn commit'.
Should we limit commits to only one file at a time?

Another alternative that I have been thinking about is only
supporting a "diff and patch" interface for the online wiki
version of the source and documentation. This would mean adding
two new options to the pamphlet thumbnail menu. Clicking on
'diff' would ask you to upload an 'original' file and then
perform a 'diff -au' against that file. The output would be
presented in the browser and could be saved as a patch file.
Clicking on 'patch' would ask you to upload a patch file and
then attempt to apply that patch to the online pamphlet source.

This "diff and patch" interface would keep the online source
and documentation pamphlets independent of the choice of underlying
repository software, but synching and committing would then be
a more manual process.

I am not sure yet which model I prefer.

> 
> I don't like very much that there is a separate (completely
> different looking branch book--main--1).

I think originally Tim had in mind that there might be people
who only wished to work on the Axiom documentation. Note there
are some files in book--main--1 that are not in any other
branch, e.g. bookvol2.pamphlet etc. I still inclined to agree
that the "large" documentation with no direct connection to
the source pamphlets should be separable. Rather than what
you suggest, I would be in favour of moving bookvol1.pamphlet
out of the Silver source distribution and into it's own svn
repository.

> I guess that makes the axiom sources even more a mess than
> they are in axiom--main--1.
> 
> Reduce the number of different repositories!
> 

I agree! My personal opinion is still that svn is a poor choice:
I would rate it only slightly above cvs and below arch. And I
rate darcs as much better than both. I still have a lot of
trouble getting svn to work properly on windows. (darcs works
fine on windows.) But in the interests of easing cooperation and
collaboration I think we need to compromise and standardize on
svn.

In fact I think we should drop the entire arch (tla) archive.
Now that we have Silver, I don't see that the arch version has
any real purpose.

Regards,
Bill Page