On Tue, 15 Sep 2009, Petr Rockai wrote:
Ganesh Sittampalam <[email protected]> writes:
Thanks. So we have a last resort, but let's try to maximise our
happiness with the code first.
Hmm. Actually, after looking at things again after a while today, I have to
partially withdraw this - sorry!
As things stand (and as I understand it), readDarcsPristine in
Storage.Hashed.Darcs knows how to *read* the darcs pristine root pointer and
also how to read plain pristine for old-fashioned repos. However the knowledge
of how to do the writing is left in darcs itself. This disconnect is asking for
trouble, IMO.
Well, I agree that this is a little stretched. But if you want to read the
darcs pristine, you have to do this -- deferring this to the client level is
just pretence. So the real question is, whether 3rd party tools are allowed to
read darcs repositories or not, without going through libdarcs (is _darcs a
black or a white kind of box). I'd go for white, since (a) if people want to
look, we can't stop them and (b) we can't change the format anyway, since old
darcs needs to be able to read it. Moreover, I think that open format is the
right attitude for a VCS -- transparency is as important as robustness and
correctness. (After all, I want to be able to peek into the, as kowey says, box
with my crown jewels.)
I'm happy, indeed keen, on it being a white box, but we can achieve that
with an in-tree hashed-storage-darcs, which over time could turn into a
proper API for reading/writing darcs repos completely (perhaps
darcs-repo would be a better name).
I'm deeply unhappy with the idea that any change to the repo format would
require coordinating changes across two separate projects as well as
figuring out all the other relevant issues. One example of why
hashed-storage isn't the right place to do the reading is that code should
check that _darcs/format is actually understood before being confident
that it knows how to read the repo.
Cheers,
Ganesh
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