arch, was Re: SourceForge has drifted away

Werner Koch wk at gnupg.org
Fri Aug 16 08:23:43 UTC 2002


On Wed, 14 Aug 2002 23:05:52 GMT, MJ Ray said:

> Harsh.  No project is ever rescued?

I only mean, _I_ won't look at it or try to help it.

> What parts in particular did you spot and what other software should they be
> replaced with?  The actual system seems to work fairly well in practice,
> although I have managed to break it once when being deliberately evil to it.

I have only looked at the source and frankly it reminds me somehow on
Dan Bernstein's code (except that Tom is clueful about Free Software
and he has comments in his code).

> Of course, a problem I have with svn is that it seems to depend on lumps of
> Apache and require use of Apache on the repository host.  No happy medium,
> eh?

I agree that the decision to use WebDAV is not a very good one.  OTOH,
SVN is modular and you can replace the server-client communication by
any other mechanism.  If I am going to use it, I couldn't live with
WebDAV or any other Firewall circumvention protocol.

> I think it's not ideal, but no worse than its competitors in the field.  CVS
> uses a mix of command-lines, environment variables and files.  arch takes

This is a misunderstanding.  I mean the build system; it is not
autoconf/automake based so it is hard to start working on arch it.
Having common standards to build software is a good thing becuase it
saves a lot of time to learn the boring details on how to build
something.

> If not, where there is a performance benefit, some parts have been converted
> to C, I think, which may be where the C library came from...

Shell skripts are in general not evil but the sheer amount of them in
arch makes me worry and they definitely don't help in debugging.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner




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