Re: [Gnu-arch-users] archzoom wishlist item

[Miles Bader]

On Sat, Aug 21, 2004 at 05:48:49PM +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:
> Tom, and others, have repeatedly said that the namespace is just 2-
> dimensional and the ordering isn't really too special. [Some of that is
> probably to quiet people wanting to change things, but anyway]

Still, I think it would obviously confuse people if the order they see
everyday in their names was not the same as that presented in a browser.
> Thats pretty cool though really cluttered. If this was displayed with
> the other view (version -> branch) then it'd look like
>   moin  
>         1.1
>               cvs      base-0 .. patch-47
>               features         base-0
>               fixes    base-0 .. patch-15
> 
> which looks much cleaner than
> 
>   moin  
>         cvs  
>               1.1     base-0 .. patch-47
>         features  
>               1.1     base-0
>         fixes  
>               1.1     base-0 .. patch-15

Sure it `looks clean', and if all your branches have the same basicaly
vestigial version number, it makes little difference.  _But_ if the archive
actually _uses_ version numbers, it will suddenly start to look a lot less
clean, and different versions of the same category/branch will be separated
in a most inconvenient manner.  IOW, your example above is sort of a
straw-man argument.

I'd suggest that a much better strategy to avoid unnecessary clutter in the
output format would be to make sure that `vestigial' versions don't consume
any unnecessary space.

One way to do this might be to put the first version entry on the same line
as the branch name -- then in the common case where there's only one version,
you'd get only one line per branch, but in the case where multiple versions
are used, they would be grouped together just like abrowse output or
whatever.

Here's your example above presented using this format (plus an other version
added to illustrate the multiple version case):
 
   moin  
         cvs            1.1     base-0 .. patch-47
         features       1.1     base-0
                        1.2     base-0 .. patch 5
         fixes          1.1     base-0 .. patch-15

-Miles
-- 
"1971 pickup truck; will trade for guns"