Re: [Gnu-arch-users] on {arch} and other names

[Alexander Deruwe]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2003 at 11:31:31AM +0300, Jani Monoses wrote:
> I only used to read the archives now and then, but I've just subscribed
> to say that I'd love arch to use more conventional names for it's
> metadata dirs and files. When I tried arch last year this was the source
> of great annoyance and the reason I looked for other alternatives. I am
> sure Tom has done a lot of groundbreaking stuff with tla but doing it
> all the way including user interface and all seems a bit too much for me
> and I am sure there are others who think the same. I'm not comfortable
> with changing the shell I use just because it's stupid because it does
> not handle all characters but $ the same. I'm sure there are many flaws
> in the tools we all use and if done again (by Tom :) they'd come out
> better but I think it's too much for tla to pretend that since it's a
> revolutionary tool all other software should be fixed to be tla-enabled.
> Reading this thread I did not see why exactly the {} and = conventions
> are beneficial and why the seasoned users prefer those if it's not just
> inertia.
> These naming conventions contribute heavily to the steepness of the arch
> learning curve IMHO.
> Call me a chicken but now I'd only switch from subversion if these
> things were sorted out. 

I think every single one of us long('ish) time arch users have felt like
this.  For a while...
It is something one tends to get over, especially because most
conventions make sense.  The only relatively annoying thing is =
completion with bash, but this one is definately a bug in bash itself
(with a fix available, by Tez).  Now if only the bash maintainer would
accept that patch....

Choosing svn over arch because of these things is just silly, imho.  And
you're missing out on a lot of cool stuff, such as sane branching and
merging.  Not to mention the fact that you won't need to run apache2, or
fix your repository every so many days.
Do note that I haven't used svn even once (CVS was hell enough for me),
so I'm reporting second-hand information.

Alexander