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

[Robert Anderson]

On Sun, 2003-09-28 at 02:38, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 11:26:23AM -0700, David Brown wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 09:31:04AM -0700, Tom Lord wrote:
> > 
> > > Another point of view says that the idea of an inventory id is a
> > > usefully universal one that transcends the issues of revision control.
> > 
> > What if we made the format of the tags more "universal", something that
> > could conceivably by used by systems other than arch.
> >
> > Perhaps:
> > 
> >  <punct> file-id: "text" <punct>
> > 
> > or even something that makes it stand out more.  That might help make it
> > clear that the file tag isn't really an arch thing, it is just that arch
> > is the only thing that can do anything useful with it.
> > 
> > Other systems make use of unique id's for files or other pieces of data.
> > Uuids get fairly common use these days.  I don't know if we want to
> > restrict the id's to a 64 bit integer, though.
> 
> it would be still obviously metadata, something completely worthless and
> pure pollution for users fetching the tarball and not caring about the
> revision history, nor to track down moves of those files when inside a
> system like arch or bitkeeper. There is no point in keeping this
> metadata mixed with the data.

Demonstrably false that there is no point.

> Infact you even mathematically risks collisions when you add new files 
> that way,

Only by user error.

> check that this tag isn't replicate twice in the whole tree which is an
> overhead with thousnad of files.

You need to do that _anyway_.  It is no compromise at all.

>You pollute the namespace of a language as well.

It's a con.  But of such small magnitude as to be insignificant, IMO.

> Who does really care not having to execute add-tag/delete-tag/move-tag?

I do.

But moreover, people who _don't have_ add-tag, delete-tag, move-tag do.

> In a big project you want strict commits anyways.

So?  What's that got to do with anything?  You seem to have some kind of
mental block about "strict commits" and explicit mode being conjoined
twins.  What is that all about?

What _exactly_ do you mean by "strict commits" and how has it got
anything at all to do with explict vs. tagline tags?

Bob