Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Announce: axp - a new command line tool

[Mikhael Goikhman]

On 28 Oct 2004 13:12:39 -0400, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> 
> Nice to have a new face on the field.

Ok, let's pretend it is new, although I mentioned axp in March. :)

> Mikhael Goikhman wrote:
> 
> What do you mean by report functionality?

This means read-only operations. ArchZoom is an example of a read-only
reporting tool. Some planned features will be available in both archzoom
and axp. It is quite easy when you have a library, you know.

> I'd say there's actually quite a lot of overlap: fork, registry and 
> star-merge-undo functionality are all provided by Fai.

There are probably many fork implementations and ideally tla will have
one too. :) Anyway, I don't really think it is practical to add more
dependancies to our tools, so some reimplementation is unavoidable.

> Fai doesn't have an explicit registry command, though.  When it 
> encounters an unregistered archive name, it automatically looks it up. 
> You can do "fai get address@hidden/foo--bar", and it just works.

Yes, this is handy, but personally I like to register archives
explicitly, this avoids unexpected problems.

> You might want to add Gergely Nagy's registry too-- Fai will use it for 
> lookups, and offer to submit manually-entered locations to it, so it's a 
> useful adjunct to the supermirror.  (For example, 
> address@hidden is there, but not on the supermirror yet.)

I am aware about arch-registry, and we spoke with Gergely about it a bit.
I think you may want to know details of my solution. It is not limited to
sourcecontrol.net. You may even define $SUPERMIRROR_PREFIX_URL and start
to use another DB (that is plain text files, similar to "tla archives").

The registry functionality is available using Arch::Registry module that
is part of arch-perl. It has a nice API for any kinds of archive/version
regexp searches, and it has a support for internal web cache. The actual
"axp registry" subcommands are just several lines.

There are two statical gzipped files:

  http://archzoom.sourcecontrol.net/registry/archives.gz
  http://archzoom.sourcecontrol.net/registry/versions.gz

These files are generated every 6 hours and weight 20Kb in total (the
generation is a matter of one millisecond). A user may produce hundreds
of searches and no more than 20Kb is fetched, since "axp registry"
defines a transparent web cache that expires in 3 hours.

Regards,
Mikhael.