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

[Dimitrie O. Paun]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2004 at 02:08:52PM -0600, John A Meinel wrote:
> Well, I can't say that I've created very large archives, but I do have 
> an archive with lots of projects. Right now I have about 90 projects in 
> my archive.

How big of an archive do you have with so many project, if I may ask?
Is performance good?

> Also, because of how version numbers work, we wanted a separate project 
> (and thus separate version) for every independent piece. Our work 
> involves a lot of pluggable libraries, so each one is it's own category. 
> This complicates things a little, as if you are doing multi-category 
> changes you have to remember to commit in each one. And you lose some of 
> the effect of having all changes bundled up into changesets (changing a 
> library means you have to change the code that uses it, but these are 2 
> separate commits.)

This seems like a very good idea. I guess the only way to be able to
atomically commit across multiple such libraries would be to have them
all just as directories in your project. Not that appealing.

> So in your case, I might have the archive:
> 
> address@hidden
> 
> With the projects:
> 
> mozilla--dev--1.7
> firefox--dev--1.0
> libpr0n--dev--1.0
> nprs--dev--1.0 <-- or whatever the mozilla portable runtime is called.
> radial-context--dev--1.6 <- this is one of the mozilla extensions
> etc.
> 
> Basically anything that is considered a library and would be subject to 
> reuse gets it's own category.

Yes, this seems like a reasonable approach that fits nicely into the
arch organization, but I'm still not happy with the 2004 in the
archive name :)

> Now, I might break things up into archives based on major project, so 
> there would be a address@hidden, address@hidden, 
> address@hidden (possibly postfixing these with -2004).

This seems to me like a very good idea, but then again, I'm just
getting into arch <g>

> creating lots of archives doesn't really hurt, as arch merges between 
> them rather easily. But I like to do it at logical big boundaries, and 
> then use logical small boundaries (like libs) to determine categories.

I can buy the logical argument, but if splitting the archives on a
project basis can help me get rid of the year in the archive name,
I see little reason not to have a address@hidden, or
even a address@hidden archive.

-- 
Dimi.