Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: baz format archives in tla

[James Blackwell]

On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 09:48:54AM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
> 
> Since you've decided to nitpick, perhaps I should be more precise.  ;-)
> 
> Thomas Lord <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> >    Ludovic> Besides, my understanding was that the ultimate goal was to
> >             remove the obligation to use a `c--b--v' name space.
> 
> Of course, I was referring to ``the ultimate goal of Bazaar'' since it's
> in baz that this archive format change was introduced first.

That's what I thought you meant.

Yeah. Mattheiu Moy is correct that the change was to ease problems for
windows users. The filesystem layout broke for some users when they had
long names for things on operating systems with limited paths. The
breakage was common enough that it needed fixing. 

Its been about a year and a half since I've touched GnuArch and a year
since I've touched Bazaar-1.x. The problem did go something like this:
A typically reasonable example is the following weighing in at 159
characters (which temporarily gets even longer when new revisions are
getting uploaded):

C:\Documents and Settings\James address@hidden
   \webpages\webpages--photoalbum\webpages--photoalbum--1.0
   \patch-1\++revision-lock\+contents

Start using rather long categories (which are in the path three times) or
really long branches (twice) and you start seeing things like 'I can rsync
an archive but I can't mirror new revisions' (since the path is too long
to deal with locking/uploads)


Bazaar-1.x (only developed for about 6 months) dealt with this by removing
the redundant path elements in a way that allowed room for stripping out 
categories, versions or branches (that's why this--that--xx/ instead of
this/that/xx/)

I suggest that Gnu Arch either take this fix or implement something
different different with similiar results. Most large projects are
concerned about portability as their developers live on heterogenous
platforms. Arguing "I can browse my archive in emacs" doesn't sell well
when considered within the context of perl & python w/ or w/o modules,
apache, php, SDL games, or much of anything available via cygwin or mingw.

Regards,
James



> 
> Thanks,
> Ludovic.
> 
> 
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> 
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> http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch/

-- 
My home page:   <a href="http://jblack.linuxguru.net";>James Blackwell</a>
Gnupg 06357400  F-print AAE4 8C76 58DA 5902 761D  247A 8A55 DA73 0635 7400

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