Re: [Gnu-arch-users] self-contained changesets?

[Joshua Haberman]

On Sat, 2003-09-27 at 13:19, Tom Lord wrote:
>     > From: Joshua Haberman <address@hidden>
> 
>     > Arch seems to require that anyone who wants to make their personal
>     > changes available to the world have access to a publically available
>     > server to host their personal archive.  Is this a safe assumption?
> 
> Mostly I think it is -- but that doesn't mean that it isn't worth
> providing support for when the assumption is false.   It's also not
> quite the case that arch requires that -- although the ways in which
> it doesn't require it should probably be made more featureful.
> 
> Would you agree that email and netnews provide the other two most
> obvious transports?

Yes, but I don't see why the specific method of transport is relevant. 
I see it as being a matter of supporting "push" methods of transport in
general.

> A simple thing is that you can, of course, pack up changesets to send
> via such transports.   Currently, encoding a tar bundle of a changeset
> is the way to do that --- certainly (as has been often discussed) a
> fancier encoding would be welcome.

What does tar (or tar/gz) leave to be desired?

>     > Is it possible to implement a command similar in spirit to "cvs diff?" 
>     > What I mean is that such a command would produce a self-contained
>     > changeset that doesn't have to be part of an archive, that could then be
>     > sent independently (say, as an attachment to email).   Such as changeset
>     > would ideally apply as cleanly as possible even if the branch from which
>     > it was generated changed in the meantime.
> 
> See: 
> 
>      % tla mkpatch -H
> 
>      % tla revdelta -H
> 
>      % tla get-patch -H
> 
>      % tla dopatch -H

Thanks.   I was aware of the mkpatch and dopatch commands, but I am not
too familiar with all the theory underlying version control, and I
wanted confirmation that changesets can play the role I am describing. 
For example, I didn't know if changesets depend on other information in
the archive, such as the patchlevel they were generated against.

Josh