On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 09:04:40AM -0700, Tom Lord wrote:
Not really. Aliases would need a distinctive syntax -- perhaps a
prefix character.
tla get :latest-emacs
How come? Existing arch names already have a distinctive syntax, so an alias
could be anything else (with the rule that they not intrude on the real
namespace). It might possibly impact error handling -- a typo could
syntactically look like an alias -- but even this seems very minor, as only
valid aliases would be accepted, and it's very unlikely that anybody would
keep lots of aliases that are a small edit-distance from real names.
The existing patch-NN syntax would look like an alias in such a scheme, but
that's an unproblematic special case I think, and indeed, that feature might
even be able to use the alias mechanism if it were flexible enough (e.g.,
allowed `computational aliases', if only for internal tla use).