Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Utterly painless arch?

[John Goerzen]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 10:28:58PM -0700, Zack Brown wrote:
> > tla make-archive
> > tla archive-setup
> 
> you forgot registering your user ID. And yes, that's what I mean. Those

Oops.

> I forget if it was Tom who suggested just having a wrapper script to
> handle all that. That would certainly be sufficient, I think.

A script is fine; it still doesn't seem all that nasty to me.

> > I find the use of filenames starting with = (which must be escaped in
> > bash) and + (which confuses many editors) far more difficult and
> > annoying.
> 
> Yes, but you don't need to read any documentation in order to figure out
> what to do with those files. That's the difference.

*I* don't.  But I think that a lot of the kind of people you are reaching
out to will have no idea that you have to add a backslash in front of all
the filenames that start with an = (the docs don't show this) or a ./ in
front of all the filenames that start with a + for many editors (I believe
the docs do briefly mention this.)  IOW, they *CAN'T* read the tla docs to
find out what to do here, because it's not covered.

Granted, at its heart, it's a shell issue, but a newbie like this is not
entirely likely to know to a) run man bash, and b) find out what to do from
reading that gigantic manpage.

> > I don't think either are complicated.
> 
> They're not complicated, they just require the overhead of studying
> docs.

I don't think that's bad.

To appreciate tla and use it well, you *have* to study the docs.  And ask
questions on this list, and look at list archives, etc (the docs don't cover
a lot of questions I have <g>)

Personally, I would say that if all someone wants is cvs, then tell them to
use cvs.  (First try to tell them *why* they don't want cvs, of course!)

You know, there is no magic bullet in this area.  Despite being new to it, I
have come to really enjoy tla and how it works, and will probably be
converting several Subversion projects to tla in short order (svn2tla
anyone?) Nevertheless, some won't be converted until certain tla
shortcomings are fixed.  Among those that won't be converted are any project
that tracks large binary files (I've got one the tracks OpenOffice
documents), because simply storing it again each time it changes will result
in unacceptable disk usage requirements.  (If I get time, I'll look into how
hard it would be to adapt tla to use rdiff for this.)

-- John