[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Archives vs. categories vs. versions

[Miles Bader]

"Dimitrie O. Paun" <address@hidden> writes:
> Why the time marking? I understand it's needed to work around
> some performance issues, but in all honesty it looks like a
> hack. Moreover, it's hard to automate. Why is it needed in to
> begin with?

AFAIK, the main reason for it is that archives are write-only, and given
the rather rigid namespace structure of arch ("kinda flat"), means that
the namespace could fill up with cruft -- temporary branches, etc.

Whether this a real problem, I don't know.  I've only been using arch
for about 1.5 years, and don't personally seem to have generated all
that much in the way of throw-away branches and the like (maybe it would
be worse for shared archives).

I suppose mirroring speed could be another issue, but I don't know much
about that.  My recollection is that the the whole-tree scan done by
mirroring is already a slight problem for people like James who mirror
many trees.

In some sense regular archive changes could be a _good_ thing if it
helped to wean people off the notion that archives are a fixed thing.

However I think that there really need to be better tools for managing
archive changes -- for instance, I've long wanted a feature that would
inform users "hey this branch is old, please use the new one here ...";
this feature would also help with intra-archive version changes (see old
threads for my suggested implementation, which may be obsolete given the
recently proposed "version variables" mechanism).

-Miles
-- 
Suburbia: where they tear out the trees and then name streets after them.