[Gnu-arch-users] mirroring concepts/practice help

[Kevin Geiss]

hi, I want to see what the experts/people with more experience think. I 
think I have a good plan, but I'm running into unexpected behavior with 
register-archive, and 'get' commands from a mirror.

I have a development archive at work, call it dev.

I want to be able to work on code in this archive at work, on my 
oft-disconnected laptop, and at home.

I think I have a good basic concept: create two mirrors of dev, one on 
my laptop, and one at home.

then on my laptop, create a local archive (call it 'laptop'). populate 
the local archive with tags of all the stuff from the dev-MIRROR on my 
laptop. same story on my home machine (call the local archive at home , 
'home').

then on laptop or at home, I can star-merge changes from the local 
dev-MIRROR into the private archive, to get changes I've made at work.

then I would like to mirror the 'laptop' archive and the 'home' archive 
onto my work machine. that way, at work, I can star-merge changes from 
either laptop-MIRROR or home-MIRROR back into dev.

the problem I'm running into is setting up the two dev-MIRRORs.

on my laptop, I registered the dev archive, using sftp as the location. 
then I used make-archive with the -m flag to create a local archive 
which was a mirror of dev. I registered the mirror as dev-MIRROR.

then I ran archive-mirror, to populate the local dev-MIRROR. that 
worked fine. tla abrowse of the local mirror on my laptop listed all 
the stuff I expected to see.

I set up a greedy revision library on the laptop.

then, I tried to 'tla get' a version from the mirror.

it seemed to put the revision in the library using the 'dev' name, 
rather then the 'dev-MIRROR' name. then 'get' tried to fetch 
'dev-MIRROR' from the library, and said 'unable to open file'.

then I unregistered the dev archive, and registered the local mirror 
with the name 'dev' rather than 'dev-MIRROR', and it worked.

what is the high-level concept/rule involved behind this behavior? I 
know I would be unable to commit changes in a working tree I get from 
the mirror, but I thought I could simply check out a working tree to 
look at it. should I just shut up and make my local archive and start 
tagging? :)

on the laptop and work machine, I have tla 1.2.1, on the home machine I 
have tla 1.3 (which in a very similar situation to this, gave me a 
message about the mirror not having the correct name rather than simply 
failing with 'unable to open file').

any insight appreciated. thanks.