Release Digest: GNU, December 17, 2003

tla 1.1

A new release of GNU arch, tla-1.1, is now officially available.

GNU arch is a distributed, changeset-oriented revision control system: an alternative to CVS and to proprietary tools such as those used to maintain the Linux kernel.

Because of the current troubles at savannah.gnu.org there may be some delay before this release becomes available from "the usual source" which is http://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch.

It can be obtained from two alternative sites:

http://regexps.srparish.net/www/
http://arch.quackerhead.com/~lord/

The tar bundle is called tla-1.1.tar.gz. Accompanying the distribution is a gpg detached signature (tla-1.1.tar.gz.sig) and my public key is attached to this message. The MD5 checksum of the tar bundle is 58527f281f425be1a015dcb015245a33.

This release contains a number of significant performance and feature enhancements and reflects the contributions of an active community of volunteer developers, reviewers, enlightening critics, kibitzers, and testers.

Of particular interest to many will be the new support (relative to 1.0) for:

• far more flexible "tagging methods"

  A variety of mechanisms have been added or improved to make it easy to import arbitrary source trees into arch.

• more regular command names and interfaces

  The naming of arch commands and their command line interfaces have received considerable attention resulting in a more regular interface.

• improved speed

  A number of basic operations have been considerably sped up, making arch more suitable for large trees.

• improved HTTP and WebDAV support

  Various issues relating to using arch through firewalls or via http proxies have been addressed.

• improved documentation

  The tutorial has been (at least "more or less" :-) brought up to date with the latest additions to arch.

• new browsing commands

  The abrowse and rbrowse commands make it easier to conveniently explore the contents of an arch archive.

• hard-linked project trees

  You can "check out" (`get' in arch-speak) a revision very cheaply in both time and space by hard-linking to an archival copy. The archival copy itself is protected against accidental corruption that might result from this practice.

• automatic "revision library management" and the ability to suppress "pristine copies"

  Formerly, checking out an arch project created two copies of the tree: one for you to edit, and another "pristine" copy for comparison purposes. This is still the default behavior however it is a simple matter to configure arch so that the space and time penalties associated with pristine copies can be largely avoided. (See the tutorial chapter about advanced revision library usage.)

• more than I can sum up in a short list

  Additionally, there are many bug fixes and small improvements.

Beyond these developments to arch itself, several "ancillary" projects have sprung up around arch since 1.0: cvs gateways, browsers, graphical user interfaces and more. The best place to learn about these is on the gnu-arch-users mailing list.

Because of the savannah.gnu.org difficulties, the web based interface for subscribing to the mailing list is currently unavailable. As an alternative, you can write to:

gnu-arch-users-request@gnu.org

putting the word "subscribe" in the subject line.

Thank you for your support,
- -t

https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=lord%40emf.net&item_name=support+for+arch+and+other+free+software+efforts+by+tom+lord&no_note=1&tax=0&currency_code=USD

The arch project is financially supported entirely by contributions from the general public. Financial help, if you are able to provide, is both very much needed and very much appreciated. You can find more information about this at:

http://regexps.srparish.net/www
or http://arch.quackerhead.com/~lord

The arch project is also, significantly, supported by contributions of labor by a substantial number of volunteers (listed in the ChangeLog and in the =THANKS file -- both of which, I fear, are doomed to be an incomplete record). A community of contributors has helped arch to advance far more rapidly than would otherwise have been possible.