[Gnu-arch-users] Re: tla grab

[Miles Bader]

"Jose A. Ortega Ruiz" <address@hidden> writes:
> While tag branches appeal more to my cvs tainted heritage, I have the
> gut feeling that configs are somehow more fitting for the task (any
> opinions on that are very welcome).

[Note that _I_ don't use configs, except when I need to update from Tom's
stuff, and so may be a bit biased in my judgements and observations.]

It depends very much on the details of your project, I think.

Some people like configs a lot, but my impression is that most people don't
use them, largely because they're kind of annoying, and generally require
more bookkeeping to deal with synchronizing multiple categories and
maintaining the configs.

Given that Tom's future-feature plans extend the capabilities of basic arch
branches to subsume some of the feature space that configs now occupy, I
have a feeling they may be even less used in the future.

However for certain types of problems, configs may be very appropriate --
for instance, a library of projects (e.g., a "GNU project" collection, or
the *bsd ports collection) might be best represented using a config of the
individual project trees.  In these case, the grouping is fairly loose, and
it's pretty unlikely a single changeset would apply to more than one
individual project.

> So i was very happy to find 'tla grab', that would be the perfect way
> to make source releases. I've seen looking the source code that
> configs are supported, and made a couple of tests that seem to confirm
> that. So i was happy until i heard in #arch than 'tla grab' is broken
> (which would explain why i found so little info on it).
>
> Does anybody know what is the status of this command? Any experiencies
> using it? Use cases where it effectively fails?

I can't say whether it's broken, as I've never used it, but it's always
seemed vestigial to me -- an idea for an interface/usage-style that never
really got developed fully.

Does anybody use it?

-Miles
-- 
I'm beginning to think that life is just one long Yoko Ono album; no rhyme
or reason, just a lot of incoherent shrieks and then it's over.  --Ian Wolff