Re: GNU Arch and Lua

[Daniel Silverstone <dsilvers@...>]

On Fri, 2004-10-29 at 19:22 +0100, Rob Kendrick wrote:
> > Suffice it to say that as evil as the clutches of tl. are; Arch is a
> > very good revision control system.
> 
> Although it gets the most important feature of any piece of software
> completely, utterly and unforgivably wrong: The user interface.  (Well,
> certainly tla does, I don't know if the interface itself is specified by
> the general Archiness of things.)  It's inconsistent, ugly, long-winded,
> unintuitive, and will wear out your hyphen key in a mater of minutes.

Some of that (the hyphens particularly) are to do with the general
structure of Arch. A lot of the nasty UI is tla though it is reasonably
easy to cope with once you're using it.

> What about Monotone?  I've not looked at it at all recently, but it used
> Lua quite extensively if I recall, and has some of the distributed
> features that seem fashionable these days.

Monotone lacks quite such serious testing that arch has had. In my
limited experience; Monotone suffers dramatically once you try to handle
more than one complicated thing at a time. Also it stores everything in
one sqlite database which causes amusing issues. Plus you have to get
full packet streams in order to merge from anyone.

> R.  (Who's quite happy with Perforce and Subversion for now :-)

Neither of those offer the globally-unique id thing which arch really
has going for it.

Darcs suffers from being in my books a not-real version control system
yet. It has various tarbally benefits but ultimately is even more
unweildy than arch when you try and do clever things.

And either way; I'm not going to publish in either of Darcs or Monotone;
so that leaves arch as the only distributed system which preserves
history properly.

The decision about whether or not to make the archive I know I'll create
into an official thing is now with the lua team. As soon as I have an
answer from them I'll publish; whichever way the decision flows.

D.

-- 
Daniel Silverstone                         http://www.digital-scurf.org/
PGP mail accepted and encouraged.            Key Id: 2BC8 4016 2068 7895