[Gnu-arch-users] Re: implicit discussion

[Aaron Bentley]

Miles Bader wrote:

> Aaron Bentley <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > > changing to a representation that used a single file per directory
> > > to hold explicit tags would improve things quite a bit.  However
> > > there doesn't appear to be any rush to change the implementation.
> >
> > Archives contain the paths of those .id files.  We can't change the 
> > representation of explicit without
> > a) breaking archive compatibility or
> > b) layering an alternate namespace on top of the filesystem.
>
>
> It doesn't have to break the old reprensetation -- just add an alternate
> representation for the same tag namespace, but don't get rid of the code
> implement the old representation.

Possible, but personally, I think it'd be borrowing trouble.  You'd have 
to make sure that the two systems couldn't conflict, and you'd have to 
do up to twice as many checks.  Plus, there's always a small chance that 
it will be incompatible with some existing packages that use explicit. 
I'd rather introduce a "super-explicit" tagging method and be done with it.

> Of course because archives containing a new representation won't be
> usable by old versions of tla, a new archive-version would have to be
> used.

Okay, so we agree that this would be breaking compatibility?

> [I guess you could also make some sort of compatibility hack that uses
> the new representation in project-trees, but then converts it to the old
> many-files representation in changesets -- but that seems much too
> complicated...]
That was "b) layering an alternate namespace. . .".  :-)

Aaron