Re: [Gnu-arch-users] the state of the union

[Aaron Bentley]

Greg Hudson wrote:

> In FSFS as well, a commit is finalized by bundling up the transaction
> directory into a file and storing that in the revs directory, after
> which time the file never changes.

So it's a form of changeset, then?

> > Client-side caches and memos are a flexible solution that scales
> > arbitrarily with the number of clients.
>
>
> Perhaps.
>
> Here's something I do often: I find a bug in one of the dozens of
> upstream programs I maintain builds of, and I narrow it down to a
> particular source file.  My first question is "is there an upstream
> fix?"  So I ask the upstream CVS repository for a log (or in some cases
> a blame annotation) of the upstream file.  I'm not going to have a
> well-populated client-side cache for the given program.  The upstream
> repository would probably rather not serve me the project's entire
> version history, and I certainly would rather not have my client pore
> through that entire history.

In Arch, a well-populated client-side cache isn't required in order to 
read the log, because the log is stored as a plain file in the archive. 
   The log contains data about which files are modified by the 
associated changeset, which may be all you need.  If you need blame 
annotation, Arch doesn't have that, yet.

On a non-local filesystem, this will be slower than a smart server could 
 achieve, but still quite feasible.

> > Worst of all, though, how are your users supposed to _recognize_ when
> > a Subversion archive has been corrupted?
>
>
> Uh, does that have *anything* to do with the debate at hand?  The answer
> to that would seem to depend on whether developers are signing their
> commits, not whether the archive is accessed through a dedicated server
> or a dumb file transport.

Not "corrupt" in the sense of "subverted", but corrupt in the sense of 
"invalid".  With plain files and a simple format, it's pretty easy to 
detect invalid revisions and to fix some forms of corruption.

Aaron

--
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
Panometrics, Inc.