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Another central organizing concept of ArX is a global namespace of
projects.
This chapter describes how projects are named, and how the names are applied to project trees.
The Structure of Project Names Archive Names Category Names and Branch Labels Version Numbers Labelling Project Trees Combining Project Trees
The ArX project name-space is designed to reflect the intricacies
of how projects evolve in the real world. For example, two or more
different organizations may separately develop and distribute a given
project. A project can split into multiple development paths. Each
path typically evolves through a series of versions. ArX provides
a way to precisely name all of these different instances of a given
project.
An ArX project name has four basic parts, introduced here, and
explained in detail below.
An Archive Name The archive name identifies the organization that distributes particular versions of a project. Some example archive names might be:
hackerlab@regexps.com--hackerlab
hurd@gnu.org--hurd-team
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The Category Name The category name is a generic name for the project. It is what people usually think of as a "project name". Some example category names are:
ArX
gcc
rx
|
The Branch Label When a project splits into multiple development paths (even if only temporarilly -- as a convenience to the maintainers), each path is given a branch label. Some example branch labels are:
development
experimental
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The Version Number ArX uses fairly simple version numbers,
consisting of a major and minor version number:
1.2
2.0
|
The four parts of a project name fit together this way:
<archive-name>/<category>[--<branch-label>]--<version-number> |
As in the example:
hackerlab@regexps.com--hackerlab/ArX--development--2.0
^ ^ ^ ^
| | | |
archive name category branch version
label
|
Notice that the archive name is separated from the rest of the project
name by /. The other parts of the project name are separated by
--.
When you use ArX, you often abbreviate project names. For example,
you can leave off the archive name and a default archive will be
presumed:
ArX--development--2.0 |
or you can leave off the version number and, depending on context, that means either "the latest version" or "all versions":
ArX--development |
If you have one branch which is "primary branch", you can leave out the branch label:
ArX--2.0
hackerlab@regexps.com--hackerlab/ArX--2.0
ArX
hackerlab@regexps.com--hackerlab/ArX
|
Those last two names are also sometimes used to mean "every branch of ArX" or "every branch of ArX at the hackerlab archive", respectively.
An archive name designates an organization that develops and/or distributes software. Archive names should be globally unique.
Later in the manual, we'll see that archive names are specifically used to identify revision control archives.
An archive name consists of an email address (with complete hostname), followed by --, followed by an additional string of numbers, letters and dashes. Choose an email address which is exclusively yours (or your project's). That way, your archive name(s) will be globally unique. Here is an example:
joe.hacker@gnu.org--test-archive |
If your organization is going to have more than one revision control archive, you'll use more than one archive name:
joe.hacker@gnu.org--gcc-archive
joe.hacker@gnu.org--guile-archive
joe.hacker@gnu.org--2001
|
You can choose an archive name to use as the default for all ArX
commands. When you run a command without explicitly specifying a
archive, the default is used:
% arx my-default-archive joe.hacker@gnu.org--2001 |
To find out the current default:
% arx my-default-archive
joe.hacker@gnu.org--2001
|
In general, ArX sub-commands accept the option -A to specify a
non-default archive:
% arx my-default-archive -A joe.hacker@gnu.org--test-archive
joe.hacker@gnu.org--test-archive
|
The category of a project name identifies, generally, what the project is. The category is the same no matter who is distributing the project, or which development path is being considered.
The branch label is optional. It can be used to distinguish alternative development paths for a given project.
The category and branch label must match the regexp:
[[:alpha:]]([[:alnum:]]*(-[[:alnum:]]+)?)* |
or in other words, they must begin with a letter and consist entirely of digits, letters, and dashes -- but must not contain two dashes in a row, and must not end with a dash.
In a somewhat arbitrary but extremely traditional way, branches are divided into a series of versions.
The version number must match the regexp:
[[:digit:]]+\\.[[:digit:]]+ |
or in other words, it must consist of two strings of digits, separated by a single period. The first string of digits is called the major version number and the second string of digits is called the minor version number.
Note: Version numbers are not revision numbers. In other words,
when the ArX revision control system stores multiple snapshots of
the development of your project, it does not assign a new version
number to each snapshot. Instead, each project version is further
subdivided into something called "patch levels", which are explained
in detail later in the manual.
Every project tree may be labeled with a project name using the
set-tree-version command, as in this example:
% cd ~/wd/ArX
% arx set-tree-version ArX--1.0
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That project name becomes the default for ArX operations within
that tree.
You can find out the project name of a tree with tree-version:
% arx tree-version
joe.hacker@gnu.org--2001/ArX--1.0
|
Notice that ArX used the default archive (returned by
my-default-archive) when set-tree-version was invoked. You can
also specify an archive explicitly, as in these two examples:
% arx set-tree-version joe.hacker@gnu.org--alt/ArX--1.0 |
or
% arx set-tree-version -A joe.hacker@gnu.org--alt ArX--1.0 |
You can, in fact, combine project trees: storing the files and directories from multiple projects under a common root. This can be useful if you have separately maintained projects that, nevertheless, are tightly integrated.
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