[Gnu-arch-users] tla 1.3: can't unregister non-existing revlib

[Haakon Riiser]

tla my-revision-library -d FOO fails when FOO doesn't
exist.  I realize I can unregister FOO manually by editing
~/.arch-params/=revision-library, but the Arch tutorial discourages
hand editing in ~/.arch-params, so I'm guessing that this situation
wasn't anticipated.

I glanced at the source, and the problem appears to be that tla
insists on converting my-revision-library's path argument to
the /real/ path (using chdir followed by getcwd).  When it can't
resolve the path in this way, it just gives up.

I assume that tla works this way because it allows you to
add/delete revision libraries using relative paths, but there's
also a problem with this, and I think it far outweighs the benefit.
In fact, this feature is directly responsible for putting me in
this situation:  I used to believe that the revision library path
was stored /exactly/ as I typed it, so I used a path containing
symbolic links.  I did this intentionally so that I could change
the physical location of the library without having to reconfigure
tla.  All I'd need to do would be to make a new symlink.  As it
is now, not only do I need to reconfigure tla (since it never used
my unchanging symlinked path), but I'm not even allowed to delete
the broken path since tla requires the path argument to exist,
even for the delete operation.

I see two solutions to this problem:

  1. Always register the path given on the command line unchanged.
  2. Leave things as they are, but make an exception for the delete
     option in that the path is used literally if it can't be
     resolved.

The first would solve both my problems, the second would just
make it possible to clean up without hand editing.

I could try to work out a patch for either of these solutions,
but first I need to know if this would be eligible for inclusion
in the official branch.  If not, I'll just keep on editing
~/.arch-params/=revision-library by hand.

-- 
 Haakon