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From: | Thomas Lord |
Subject: | Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Mirroring local archives locally and remotley |
Date: | Mon, 24 Jul 2006 08:06:54 -0700 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 1.5 (X11/20060313) |
Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> Note that for users of your mirrors, the name transparently > remains your original archive name (without the `-MIRROR' thing), > which is really neat. I personally dislike the `-MIRROR' and `-SOURCE' special-casing. I found it hard to understand (especially when looking at the online doc where it is unclear whether the capital letters denote address@hidden' in Texinfo terms, or whether they should be taken literally), plus it leaves the impression that each archive can only have one mirror. I agree, and I was specially reminded just recently why I also dislikeit.
I don't think that there's any doubt but that it's a mis-feature. It violates some principle of good taste or good design to give archive names internal structure like that. The particular syntax is appalling. Now that I don't use it every day I find that even I wind up looking it up and taking three tries to use it correctly. There's really nothing good about it. I'm sure I can see how it happened: I must have been too lazy or too rushed on a given day to make the archive registration database fancier. It would be better if all related archives had the same name, if the database (in ~/.arch-params) kept track of source/mirror relations, if there was indeed a command to update all mirrors at once, if writes went automatically to the appropriate archive, and if there were a command-line syntax for indicating a specific mirror or source archive when many have the same name. I vaguely recall the idea being discussed on the list some time ago but apparently not at a time that anybody felt like working on it. -t
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