Re: Gud lord!

[Robert Anderson <rwa@alumni.princeton.edu>]

On Sat, 2003-06-07 at 15:35, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > I'm also curious what you mean by "well supported."  I can't think of a
> 
> I think it's pretty simple:
> - is there a ViewCVS equivalent for Arch ?

It's called Perspective.  It doesn't have as many features as ViewCVS,
but that's partly because it doesn't have to, since the underlying
revctl is quite a bit more sane to begin with.

http://arch.fifthvision.net/bin/view/Main/PerspectiveHome

> - is there a PCL-CVS equivalent for Arch ?
> - is there a vc-arch.el ?

There are two arch emacs modes that I know of, in varying stages of
functionality.  One of them is by Walter Landry and one of them is by
Stephen J. Turnbull (who also does Xemacs development and has been
talking about the possibility of using arch for Xemacs).  I cannot give
you specifics on them, mostly because I don't see how an emacs mode is a
boon for arch (I tried Walter's and it didn't click with me).  It seems
easier just to use the command line to me, especially if you have good
dynamic completion code to work with - I wrote such a module for bash,
and I think others exist as well.

> - is arch available on all the platforms used by Emacs developers
>   and other people trying things out via the anon-CVS repository ?

This is probably the biggest hurdle.  The answer is "very likely not." 
Especially if non-cygwin windows support is required.  This is why an
interim interoperation scenario is almost certainly the way to go.

> Don't get me wrong, I think arch is really cool.  But I think before
> trying to get us to switch to arch, you should help us write vc-arch.el.
> I've recently cooked up vc-mcvs.el and vc-svn.el in a pretty short
> amount of time.  I haven't had the time to do it for vc-arch.el, but
> it should be pretty easy if you follow the same pattern: take vc-cvs.el
> (or vc-svn.el), do s/cvs/arch/ on the file to start with and then
> fix things.  I'd be happy to help, of course.

I think you (I) might find that an interface designed for cvs is not
going to work well with arch, because arch's interace is significantly
different than CVS's.  arch is not a CVS work-alike with a couple
extras.  It is fundamentally different. For example, it is not file
oriented, it is "source tree" oriented.  etc.

In any case, I think an emacs mode is a very minor point wrt the value
of adoption.

IMO, the real hurdle here is portability.  Parties interested in
removing that hurdle are invited to arch-users:
http://www.fifthvision.net/open/bin/view/Arch/ArchUsers

Bob