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

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Miles Bader <address@hidden>
    > Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:
    > >     >> Personally what _I'd_ like to see is a universal standard for
    > >     >> taglines,
    > > 
    > > I think you (Miles) should want to see a universal standard for
    > > _tags_, of which taglines are a subset.

    > Perhaps, but I think (perhaps wrongly) that taglines are an easier thing
    > to standardize on, because the meaning of such standardization seems
    > more obvious -- if a file contains an appropriate tagline, use that as a
    > name-independent id for the file.  But what does it mean to standardize
    > explicit tags?  The on-disk representation?  The tag values?  If the
    > latter, how does such standardization actually help, since portable ways
    > of exchanging files don't offer any way to contain the tags?

    > I could be missing the obvious, of course, but taglines seem like a
    > much easier target.  :-)

But, in and of themselves, not a very interesting target -- it's
a fragment of a useful unit of functionality.

I think what would be usefully standardized is, for starters, a
mechanism sufficient for `tla inventory --source --both --all --tags'
and `tla inventory --source --both --tags' (disk formats,
=tagging-method, perhaps (trivially) the output format of those
commands).  That would subsume the embedded tag mechanism of `tagline'
but be larger than it.

That, in turn, is a sufficient foundation for then defining changeset
tools.  Given portable and stand-alone changeset tools, perhaps one
could start making the case for using them as an exchange format
between rev ctl systems.

(I don't think that changeset tools are the only reason to standardize
inventory.  Auditing and signing releases comes to mind.)


-t