[Gnu-arch-users] Re: give us a hand with arch

[Miles Bader]

Bruce Stephens <address@hidden> writes:
> In principle it ought to be easy enough, I think; the complexity is
> likely to be coping with existing archives.)

I don't think it would be so hard.

I see changes in 3 areas:

 (1) The inventory code of course has to be extended to read whatever
     new representation there is (I favor simply having .arch-ids be a
     _file_ a CVS/Entries-style list of filenames/tags).  Not hard.

 (2) mkpatch/dopatch should be changed to recognize these files, and
     apply a custom diff/patch method to them (this could be part of a
     general `custom diff/patch' change, or merely a special case); it
     should treat each entry in isolation [and probably ignore file
     order], rather than having context like ordinary diffs.  This also
     doesn't seem hard (at least, the custom diff/patch would be very
     easy, I'm not sure about having it invoke the custom methods to
     begin with).

 (3) {add,remove,move}-{tag,id} (just a bit of -id advocacy here :-)
     should be changed to act appropriately, depending on whether
     .arch-ids is a file or a directory.  This doesn't seem hard either.

Existing projects with .arch-ids directories need not change immediately
(or ever, I suppose) to the new method, and when/if they _do_ change,
I'd think normal arch mechanisms could probably handle it as with any
other change (I think this is one very lovely thing of basically
treating all the meta-data files as normal files when making/applying
changesets).

Are there obvious problems with the above?

Thanks,

-Miles
-- 
We have met the enemy... and he is us.  -- Pogo