Re: [Gnu-arch-users] The future of GNU Arch users

[James Blackwell]

On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 12:14:25PM +0100, Toby White wrote:
> address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> > Anyway, does anyone have interest in maintaining tla?  A pre-1.4 release
> > was announced in February but 1.4 never went out; additionally, 1.3.3 is
> > broken on some architectures (at least SPARC and PPC).

> One of the things I really liked about tla was the very small list
> of dependencies. I have tla compiled up on a wide range of new &
> old Unices. Not always easily, but the problems were isolated to
> getting tla itself compiled correctly; Gnu patch, diff, tar, & make 
> are about the most portable programs I've found.

These problems aren't generally a problem for gnu operating systems but
have been lightly  more problematic for Unixes and BSDs and a bit more
significant for windows. 

> But this means I can't upgrade to baz - I've no intention of trying to 
> get all of expat, libgpgme (>=1.0) and libgpg-error compiled everywhere;
> it was difficult enough trying on Mac OS X Tiger (which I still can't
> get to work, and that ought to be one of the better supported targets)
> What hope have I of getting it all compiled on anything more esoteric?

This doesn't mean you _can't_ upgrade to baz. It means you don't want to
upgrade to baz. That's a fair and reasonable thing. I used to have the
same problem on slackware a long while ago, a problem that disapeared when
I moved to Debian (I started on bo). These days, most modern distros
either have (Debian and Redhat based distros) or shortly will have apt-get
support.


> And bzr is not an option - I don't mind it being written in Python; I
> can usually find a version of Python on most hosts, but its requiring 
> minimum 2.4 makes it useless to me.

2.4 is admittedly a high target. However, by December (the target release
date for bzr) 2.4 will be the common version out there. 

What are you running for an operating system?

> So if there is any interest in continuation of tla, or reducing the
> dependencies of baz (I'd be reasonably happy without signed archives
> most of the time) then there's at least one potential user here.

Anybody that considers continuing the tla and/or baz code base should bear
in mind that the two teams that were working on the codebases decided to
go for full rewrites.


> Otherwise I'll stick with old tla versions for the moment, and
> start thinking about migrating elsewhere - does anyone have any
> recommendations for modern VC systems with very small dependency
> lists?


My sincere advice is to stick with tla for as long as it continues to meet
your needs and then migrate to bzr when you are ready (such as when python
2.4 is on many of your machines). As long as youre internally focused you
should be able to continue on with tla for awhile.



-- 
 James Blackwell      |   Life is made of the stuff that hasn't killed
 Tell someone a joke! |   you yet.                       - yours truly
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