[darcs-users] Re: File name too long

[BARBOUR Timothy]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Roundy [mailto:droundy at abridgegame.org]
[...]
> That's one issue.  The other (and to me almost equally 
> important one) is
> that as long as the filenames look human-readable, humans 
> will try to read
> them.

Perhaps it is a bad thing for casual users to read the repository, but
probably not so bad for administrators. Maybe it is okay provided people
understand that they must know what they are doing.

Do the human-readable names have any benefit when you are debugging darcs or
recovering from a bug ?

> If the _darcs/patches directory looks like a bunch of 
> hashes (which
> is what it really is, in either case),

How do you mean ?

> people will look 
> elsewhere, which is

Where should they look if they are worried about the integrity of a
repository ? Keep in mind that some repositories contain millions of lines
of code (the CVS repository here holds at least 3 million lines).

> good, because darcs itself looks elsewhere, so people will 
> more likely be
> looking at the data that is actually meaningful.

When I was considering whether to adopt darcs, the clarity of the repository
format appealed to me, not because I wanted to use it as a source of
information, but so I could (probably) fix it if it was broken. For a new
user, who naturally has some qualms, the human readable format is
reassuring. One of the virtues of CVS is its fairly readable repository,
which allows administrators to fiddle with it occasionally (probably only
needed because of deficiencies in CVS, even though CVS is mature). One
criticism of VSS is its binary repository format - no one can tell what is
going on in there.

Maybe it would help to retain the option of writing the long-filename hard
links, and mention it in the manual. Another handy thing might be a pair of
tools for readily converting between the name and the hash.

Tim

-- sorry about the lame .sig --


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