[Axiom-developer] gnu-arch

[Tim Daly]

If it works anything like bitkeeper (and it appears to do just that)
then it works as follows:

I create a tree (or several trees) locally. You can ask to "pull" a
copy of my tree. Now my tree is the parent and yours is the child.
You can make changes locally and send me "changesets". A changeset
is just a collection of patches, hopefully with a common goal. This
solves the problem of changing multiple files in sync (so you don't
make the mistake I just made last night and forget a file change).

You can pull the latest parent tree and it gets automatically merged
with your local changes.

The main advantage is that I can create several trees and share them.
Right now the only shared resource is the savannah CVS and I have to
be very careful what I put up there because I can (and do) break the
build.

Local trees mean that we can create sub-projects to explore ideas (which
is how I work locally, albeit by hand) without breaking the build for
the world. For instance, I want to work on the automatic coercion 
code from Nicolas's PhD thesis which will deeply break the world for
a while. So all you would normally see is silence from me while I 
get it working. It would be better if you could see and change the
latest broken code without waiting for CVS.

So hopefully gnu-arch will give us the ability to share experimental
trees.

t