James K. Lowden wrote:
> 1. The keyword domain expands very slowly, if at all. CVS was around for
> a long time with a stable list of them.
You may have missed the 'ping' to the list just this morning about a patch to
add a new Header keyword (that was originally submitted in March 2008). And you
also may not recall that there were a couple of keywords added initially outside
of CVS that relied on custom clients for a time (the *BSD people in particular,
see below).
> 2. There aren't that many attributes that make sense to use in this way.
> It's very hard to imagine the hot new keyword of 2009.
The keyword system was rewritten some time ago in the hope that we could come up
with a way to provide server-specific keywords (e.g. the *BSD people want to
recreate their CVS hack to only expand their own keywords on stuff imported from
the other streams). If we could come up with a server-distributed configuration
file, custom keywords would be (at this point) relatively trivial to add without
having to distribute custom clients.
> 3. Upgrading the client isn't difficult.
Not so. Some/many people are limited (by corporate policy) to only installing
packages from a single source (think RedHat Enterprise Server), so there is
frequently a significant gap between a new core release and distro releases.
RHEL4 is still technically stuck on Subversion 1.1.4 and RHEL5 is still shipping
1.4.2 (even the just released 5.2). You have to go with a third party repo like
Dag's RPMForge repo.
> Please bear in mind that the whole property-setting feature is pretty hard
> to grasp. Lack of validated input only makes it harder to get right.
Properties have definitely not been given the care and feeding that some people
would prefer. I suspect this may be due to the feeling on the part of some
people (me included) that keywords can quickly lead to "action at a distance
magic" that is extremely hard to deal with (think the $Log$ keyword in CVS for
example).
John
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Received on 2008-06-25 13:15:46 CEST