Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: darcs vs tla

[John A Meinel]

Talli Somekh wrote:
> I don't know where this myth that windows will never be supported by  
> GNU arch comes from. Everyone wants it to happen and it will happen.  
> It's just a question of how to do it without compromising the quality  
> of the product.

Well, speaking as someone who is actively using tla on windows, and 
working hard to make it run better, I can very safely say that tla 
*will* run on windows. Now, my personal itch is to get it to run along 
with cygwin, since that is a little easier to do, and I have long used 
cygwin, because it's a good tool. Since tla is command-line only right 
now, it seems reasonable that cygwin isn't a big overhead.

Getting a truly native version is probably a little more difficult, as 
tla uses the raw open()/close(), not the libc fopen(), fclose(), etc. I 
believe in win32 these are called _open(), and _close(). But really for 
windows what you want is a gui.

I know there is a goal of getting tla broken up into a library and a 
cmd-line wrapper, which would make it much easier to create a gui out of 
it. (Right now the wrappers all depend on forking a tla sub-process to 
get work done.)

>  From the comments in this thread, seems darcs is a really great tool  
> that many people enjoy using and GNU arch has a lot to learn from it.  
> Further, it's implementation may have made it much easier to support  
> windows faster. But by that design, it appears to be a limited tool not  
> well suited to complex deployments. That may or may not change.
>
> GNU arch was designed and has been implemented in such situations.  
> Compromising it's effectiveness in this regard to support Windows ain't  
> such a hot prospect for anyone in this community so the effort isn't  
> being taken lightly.
>
> So, anyway, thanks for the wager, see ya at the finish line.
>
> talli

actually, darcs looks like it might be quite nice to use as well. I look 
forward to seeing what it turns into. I really wonder why patch-signing 
would be difficult to incorporate into the system. In tla, we just added 
a file that said "here's the signature" and run a user-specified program 
(gpg) to sign it, and another user specified program (wrapper around 
gpg) to check the signature.

I can't say why this would be hard with darcs. Though I know last I 
checked they didn't have pre/post commit hooks, or other such goodies 
which also let you nice things.

I think keeping an archive of emails just so you can get signatures is 
pretty silly, since that means you have to email yourself every time you 
do a commit.

John
=:->

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