Re: [Arx-users] How does tag work?

[Kevin Smith]

Walter Landry wrote:
> Kevin Smith <address@hidden> wrote:

> > address@hidden waldron $ arx commit -s "After initial week"
> > Problems with a filesystem call
> > boost::filesystem::rename
> > ,,commit.20041127T185853/++cache/,,removed-by-dopatch-2004-11-27T18:58:54/,,added-119
> > ,,commit.20041127T185853/++cache/_arx
>
> Hmm.  That is odd.  It would be good to know how you got into that
> situation.  Do you have a shell history that shows how you got there?

Sorry, no. That tree has been through a lot of pain over the last couple 
days, and my shell history is fairly short.

> > Doh! Apparently I'm not allowed to delete that silly ,, file that I 
> > never wanted in the first place.
>
> Actually, if you had deleted it with "arx rm", or used "rm" before the
> "init-tree", then it would have worked fine.  The problem is that the
> init-tree "add"ed it.

Well, it was init-tree that created it (without my consent). At a 
minimum, init-tree should probably spit out a message like "I just 
created ,,2004293523742983 which you can use to enter a log message for 
the next checkin. If you prefer to use -s, use arx rm ,,200423598234 to 
get rid of the file.

Well, that's too verbose, but for anyone not already immersed in the 
arch/arx world, it's all very odd. I would prefer that it not create the 
file by default. I would have expected add to ignore ,, files.

> Hmm.  I had forgotten how annoying CVS is.  Tags in CVS are used in
> different ways than in ArX.  In CVS, they are the only way to mark a
> particular tree-state.  Such a facility is not needed as much in ArX,
> since every tree state can be retrieved easily.  Tags in ArX are used
> when you want to have a separate branch that marks only major changes.
> I believe that is explained in the manual in section 5.9.1.

Not exactly. Section 5.9.1 describes how to use arx tags as kind of a 
"promotion" workflow, from sandbox to testing to stable. For my own use, 
I'm more interested in "tagging" releases with a marketing version 
number such as 0.1 or 2.5. How can I do that with arx?

> However, I am planning to coalesce the functionality of tag and config
> into a single command (fixing bug #10297).  

Hm. If anything, I would have expected tag to just become a subset of 
branch. Eclipse's cvs plugin is cool that way--when you tag "1.0" it 
automatically becomes a branch at the same time.

> Essentially, tag would
> reduce to the trivial case of a configuration where you only have the
> main project.  In that case, I might use a completely different
> command, like "aka", "group", "mark", "consolidate", "combine",
> "symlink", "pseudonym", or something else (my favorite right now is
> aka).

Hm. Tagging (e.g. "0.1") seems like a pretty fundamental operation to 
me. Assuming there is an easy way to do that, I'm not sure why it would 
need to be lumped in with a complex feature like config.

Just my outsider perspective...

Thanks again,

Kevin