Re: [Arx-users] ArX and simplicity

[Kevin Smith]

Walter Landry wrote:
> I have considered going even farther than that.  I was thinking of
> allowing you to specify only a revision number when inside a tree.
> Something like
> 
>   arx diff ,13
> 
> would diff the tree against revision 13.  With the hashes for
> revisions, you may not generally have separate branches.  In that
> case, you could specify as much of the hash as needed to uniquely
> identify it.  Outside of the tree, there is no longer a default
> archive or branch, and you have to manually specify everything.

That sounds good.

> For someone doing purely local work, they will now have to specify an
> archive for the common operations "get", "init", and "tag".  That
> doesn't seem so bad.

Definitely for get and init, since they are rare. I'm not sure why tag
would fall into that category, but that's probaby because I'm thinking
of it as if it were CVS tag. Which is still the most common way I would
use it, but probably only a subset of its power. Anyway, if I'm inside a
working tree when I tag it, I shouldn't have to specify an archive.

> Actually, I don't think we really need a prefix.  If you create an
> alias with the same name as an archive, it should be simple to detect
> that.  I have so many other things to work on, but if you give me a
> patch, I will incorporate it.  This can be implemented before archive
> hash names, and should transfer cleanly once that arrives.

I probably won't have time, but will keep it in mind.

> Using "#" as a separator and requiring the archive name should solve
> this problem.  Then "foo" and "foo#" will mean the same thing.
> 
> I don't like having two ways of doing things.  It just confuses
> people.  I am gravitating towards
> 
>   arx browse archive#branch.subbranch,revision
>   arx browse archive
>   arx browse archive#
> 
> where the last two commands do the same thing and "archive" can be an
> alias.

I like it.

So on an http server, you could actually browse to
archiveurl/branch/subbranch but within any ArX tool you would be forced
to use the # and . delimiters, right? I think that would work well.

Kevin