Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Backing up Arch archives

[Tom Lord]

    > From: address@hidden (Julian T. J. Midgley)

    >> And, hmm.... while (3) [re-creating missing lockdirs] can be done
    >> with a trivial shell-script, probably arch should have a command for
    >> that after all, just to make the process stone-simple.

    > It'd be helpful if this command could only ever be executed whilst the
    > archive was in a state which made committing to it impossible.  

Unfortunately, I don't think that that can be done in a reasonable
way.   It would have too many other side effects that people would
complain about and wouldn't be useful for much.

Probably the right way to do this is to _not_ make the script a tla
subcommand but rather just to add a new administrative interface.


    > Has tla any facility for locking the entire archive (such as
    > effectively can be done by touching "=meta-info/mirror", but
    > preferably without producing the misleading error messages that
    > doing that would for those who tried to commit)?

No, and, it would be icky.

The simplest way to do it would be a single global lock but of course
that would hork concurrent commits.   You could do it with a fleet of
global locks, but that'd still slow down commits, cause problems if a
single archive spanned multiple devices, make archive permissions
harder to manage, and add a confusing new set of states in which you'd
sometimes have to `lock-revision --break'.    Just not worth it for
this one little thing.

(Of course, it'd be handy for the long sought-after
changestamps-to-speed-up-mirroring to, but, still, costs v. benefits
-- not worth it I think.)

-t