Re: [Gnu-arch-users] --forward mostly harmless

[Patrick Mauritz]

Am Montag, 13. September 2004 23:02 schrieb James Blackwell:
> 2. We open ourselves to breaking one of our tenant contracts with the
> users -- that archives and changesets are "transparent". If we start
> using our very own diff, patch, gzip and tar, we open up to the nasty
> possibility of divergeance.
in this case, it might be worth to promote the split of library and frontend 
to upstream where it's not like that already (gzip, I think), maybe try to 
push arch as a suitable development tool for those tools/libraries, too. 
(alternatively track releases like that)
after that, a libpatch would be just another entry in the configuration.

currently there's a risk for divergence, too: different versions of tar, diff 
and patch might behave slightly different, and there's basically no mechanism 
right now to protect against that except the assumption that any incompatible 
tool will be incompatible so much that it fails on first invocation.


patrick mauritz