Re: arch taglines for emacs

[Tom Lord <lord@emf.net>]

    > From: Miles Bader <miles@lsi.nec.co.jp>

    > I think this behavior is dangerous because whitespace and comment
    > delimiters can get changed inadvertently, whereas users are more likely
    > to be careful about the actual tag string (which looks `magic').

That's fine, although no problems have ever been reported in practice.

    > I've posted a proposed solution to the gnu-arch-users mailing list, so
    > we'll see how that pans out.

Your solution was no good because it wasn't strictly upwards
compatible but strictly upwards compatible solutions are certainly
possible.

(Strict upwards compatibility is more important in revision control
than in many software systems, since a large part of the point is to
keep around very long-lived archives without having to format-convert
them every N weeks.   Upward compatibility is even more of a priority
for arch since it is a distributed system, but we can't rely on all
users publishing archives to upgrade at the same time.   Welcome to my
own personal hell. :-)

-t