Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Some issues

[mdpoole]

Matthieu Moy writes:

> Michael Poole <address@hidden> writes:
>
>>> Changesets are tar files. They cannot be posted easily to a mailing
>>> list for approval and commit; metadata tends to get lost.
>>
>> How so?  If you have the tar file, you can use show-changeset to get a
>> summary of the changes or apply it to your tree.  I have not plumbed
>> the details of some of the files and directories in a changeset, but
>> most of them seem to be there for a reason.
>
> See this discussion about that :
>
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2004-04/msg00650.html
>
> tla show-changeset  is nice, but  not bidirectional. You  can't easily
> build a  changeset based  on the output  of show-changeset.  There's a
> clear lack here.

I never assumed show-changeset would be an invertible operation.  I
said "If you have the tar file."  A tar file can easily be mailed or
put on a web server, and you do not have to worry about tab<->space
conversions breaking it (which is a frequent problem with plain text
patches on the linux-kernel list).

Sure, you can argue that a flat-text changeset format would be nice,
but it will sometimes break for non-ASCII files and inevitably break
for binary files.

Michael