[Gnu-arch-users] Re: DARCS

[Miles Bader]

Zack Brown <address@hidden> writes:
> There are also plenty of small projects that don't need the sophistication
> of tla. Dealing with tla's startup overhead may be fine for large projects,
> but for a lot of smaller things and single-user projects CVS and Subversion
> will probably be a lot of users' first choice.
> 
> But there are a lot of really big projects out there that would find their
> entire development model transformed by something like tla.
> 
> Also, I suspect that a lot of projects have stayed smaller than they could
> become, precisely because nothing like tla was available. As amazing as the
> growth of free software has been, tla offers to bring it to a new
> level. It's just a different order of organization.

This is definitely true; what I wonder is, is it possible to make it utterly
painless to start using arch without introducing obstacles that would make it
hard for a project to grow later (for instance, the most `initially painless'
tagging-method in arch might actually be `by name', but that causes obvious
problems later on)?

Other than the inventory/tagging-method stuff, what exactly _is_ annoying
about starting up with arch?  Certainly the necessity of choosing a
category/branch/version doesn't seem overly onerous -- for most projects
those things are probably obvious, and it's easy to change them later.

I can't offhand think of many problems with tla that don't also exist with
subversion, etc.  [and indeed setting up a subversion server seems downright
daunting]

Certainly the tagging-method question thing seems like the biggest pain.

Some small improvements might be to:

  (1) Get the more powerful tagging-method stuff merged

  (2) ... then make it easy to import .cvsignore files (might be a shell
      script)

  (3) Even just make the default =tagging-method regexps cover more common
      cases, e.g., consider autom4te.cache as junk  :-)

  (4) Make it very simple to tag an existing source tree for import (with
      either explicit tags or taglines); I've got my `tla-update-tags' script
      which tries to do this

  (5) Maybe make a shell script that automates some of the steps in the
      tutorial (`Where's your archive located?', `What branch name to you
      want to use?', ... `I see the following source file types in your tree,
      and the following unrecognized files... would you like to change
      something?')

[Personally I think my own change of removing the `--in-place' option made
tla about twice as easy to use. :-) ]

-Miles
-- 
97% of everything is grunge