Re: [GNU-arch-dev] Re: [Gnu-arch-users] how to fix a bad log message?

[Andrew Suffield]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 07:30:46PM -0500, John Yates wrote:
> Here is a half-baked idea...
> 
> It seems to me that arch has conflated two use cases:
> 
> 1) committing work to an archive
> 2) publishing committed results to the rest of the universe
> 
> Not being an arch developer I can wave my hands and imagine
> decomposing commit into two distinct operations.  Consistency
> of mirrors would be achieved by having the code pulling a
> mirror copy harvest only published changes.  (Ideally a user
> updating a mirror could query some volatile/ephemeral state to
> discover the existence committed-but-not-yet-published work.)
> 
> This would provide a well defined notion of what changes can
> be undone and which only be reversed.

Only if you are willing to accept that nobody, not even *you*, can
access the 'unpublished' stuff. Which makes it pretty useless
really. In essence you would rename 'commit' to 'publish' and
introduce a no-op called 'commit'.

This stubborn wrong-headed notion that you ever want to modify a
revision once it's been created needs to stop. You don't. Whatever
you're trying to do can and should be done in some other way. Usually
by committing a new revision that changes the offending thing again.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
 `. `'                          |
   `-             -><-          |

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature