Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch lkml

[Eric W. Biederman]

Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

>     > From: address@hidden (Eric W. Biederman)
> 
>     [topic is roughly: does arch botch merging vs distributed development]
> 
>     > I may be behind the power curve, as I have only skimmed what is present
>     > in arch but I think I can explain myself.
> 
> No sweat.  On our side, i'm just a couple of days away from preX
> release that has an updated tutorial -- the current version is
> annoyingly, ever so slightly, out of sync with the sources.  After
> that release, I think the tutorial can be a pretty decent way to catch
> on.

Well I have read through it again, plus played with arch a little bit
so I am have a better understanding.


>     > So the cases that I believe are important for being distributed are
>     > multiple repositories, and merging multiple branches from multiple
>     > repositories into one branch.
> 
> These are things arch does very well.

On thing it does not do is have the concept of a distributed repository,
which may be a strength of bitkeeper.  You may be fine with just very
good multiple repository handling, but I'm not certain.

I have an odd feel about the way arch does merging and tagging but
I have not been able to pin down yet if it is a problem or just
that it does not do things as I would expect.

The one very obvious potential issue I see with arch as it currently stands
is that it does not use one of the more sophisticated storage formats
for storing deltas.  Which means as your archive size increases the work can
increase.   I think with a different backend format cacherev would not
be necessary.  But I may be wrong.

Also there is the matter of meta data in arch not being checksummed,
which is an obvious wart.

On the plus side the user interface to arch does not seems usable
and there appears to be a decent community around it at this point.

My temptation is to fix the warts I see in arch, when I can
clearly articulate them, and be certain they are warts.  Assuming
radical things like changing the archive storage format is something
you would not have problems with.

As the time delay in this message I don't have a lot of time for
version control at the moment but ...

Eric