Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Recover a deleted file

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

>> That's because tla is about making complex things possible.  Making
>> simple things simple has been forgotten somewhere along the way.

MB> That's a pretty bizarre thing to say.  There are many common operations
MB> which are insanely easier with tla than with CVS;

The (correctly designed) data structures used by tla make a lot of
things that are difficult or impossible to do with CVS reasonably easy
to do with tla; however, there are a lot of things that everyone needs
and that should be completely trivial to do with tla but aren't.

We are all annoyed by these lacks when we first use tla, and then we
all end up with collections of silly scripts.

Examples include:

  - revert;
  - switch;
  - register-archive + archive-mirror + get;
  - archive-mirror + update or just update, depending on the archive;
  - diff patch-A patch-B and diff branch-A branch-B;
  - export and release;
  - branch.

I think the problem with tla is that it insists on exposing too much
of the implementation, and hence ends up being mighty unfriendly.  A
good example is the third in the list above (register + mirror + get):
from an implementer's point of view, these are three distinct
activities; from a user's point of view, it's a single task (get the
latest devel tree of tla in such a way that I can conveniently update
later).

                                        Juliusz