tla and keeping code

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

I'm thinking of doing a quite big change to the GNU System Creator,
and wanted to know what people think about it before I start modifing
things.

Right now all source code is downloaded from ftp.gnu.org or some other
ftp site when you build a package, and then any patches that are
needed are applied using patch.  This is quite messy to handle since
you will have to recreate the patch, run `make patch' to apply the
patch in question and hoping that it will apply cleanly etc.

What I'm thinking of doing is to rewamp the whole
"fetch-extract-patch" bit to use TLA archvies.  So instead of fetching
any code using ftp/http/etc, extracting it and then patching it before
building, we would just grab the TLA archive for the package.

This would be automaticly done using a so called `build-config' script
in tla where you specify what to get from where.

One could then remove a bit redundant information like the package
name and version number and get those automaticly from the so called
"category name" (really, just the name of the project) and other
various bits of information that tla would provide.

This is quite a big change since not many GNU projects use TLA to
handle source code managment.  So one would have to mirror a bunch of
GNU projects and non-GNU projects manually for some time.  With time
this number would grow smaller since Savannah will hopefully support
TLA in the future.

But I think the pain of manually mirroring a couple of projects for
now is something one can cope with.  Specially if one writes a couple
of scripts to do the mundane bits...

In the end, the tree for the GNU system creator would look /usr/src on
the BSDs, so we could just put it in /src and let all users have
access to the source code, and a simple way to handle their own
modifications if they wish to do so without having to go and figure
out the awkward patching system the GSC has right now.


What do people think?


Happy hacking!!!