Software configuration management

Posted Feb 24, 2004 17:29 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Please, when publishing comparisons, do not neglect Monotone. What does BK do that Monotone doesn't? What can Arch do (if anything) that Monotone doesn't? If Arch fails to satisfy in some way, that doesn't imply that the distributed model is equally unsatisfactory; it may well be a detail peculiar to Arch itself.

I had been keenly interested in Arch until I started looking around and discovered that Monotone looks altogether better constructed, and may be a sounder basis for future work.

Posted Feb 24, 2004 23:22 UTC (Tue) by aya (guest, #19767) [Link]

Re: Arch's "weird filenaming conventions", do you mean the {arch} directory? You shouldn't be touching that yourself any more than you should be touching the contents of CVS directories. I honestly can't think of any tla-created files that should cause problems in scripts, provided you know how to properly deal with strings that can contain special shell characters. (If you can't, I suspect you shouldn't be writing shell scripts in the first place.)

As for the POSIX problem, various people are working on making Arch work well with Windows; Tom Lord himself can't, and won't, but I doubt he would refuse patches for it to happen unless they were too intrusive. More likely, though, I suspect we'll see things happen like fixing cygwin to deal with long filenames consistently; sitting in #arch on irc.freenode.net, I've watched things like this happen.

I do agree, though, Arch should (and probably will) go through some shakedown time. Still, I use it for personal projects exclusively now, and really like the way it does branching. (I use that to develop features in their own branches as I feel appropriate, and then later just merge the changes into mainline.) Once 1.2 comes out, I'll probably switch on the new signed archives feature.