group w bench

those wonderful songsters of the south

Sounds I have enjoyed recently: the tune Damaged Goods from Gang of Four, a greatest hits album of Arlo Guthrie, Gnarls Barkley's album, Twig and Mancini (Let's fucking brunch!). Also, did I mention Damaged Goods? Yes yes.

I'm your native son

I think I have finally been able to verbalize what I don't like about GNU arch. Enumerated: (1) Complicated offline operation; (2) Insane command-line interface (register-archive versus archive-mirror, commit -s or commit -m?, foo -h versus foo -H, etcetera); (3) Slow. There. There it is.

I recognize in myself an adherence to the known thing, a partiality about things I am familiar with. My family used to have a house in the mountains of Avery County, North Carolina, where we'd go to chill sometimes. Each trip we'd hike what I think was called Bellvue Mountain, which, as I was told, was the highest mountain in the county. I knew this, internalized it, told it to people I took up there. But in the end I realized what I knew was only my relationship to the mountain, not its relationship to the world. Sure it was important to me but I have no idea how it relates to anything else, without looking at it myself.

I mean to say that the only reason that I think that someone can stay with GNU arch is the familiarity, the affection for the tool, the idea that it's the tallest mountain in the county. If you actually walked around the area without preconceptions, I think that you would not end up with Arch. It was excellent at the time, but everything else is better now. Anyone that uses Arch now should try Mercurial, Git, Bazaar, Darcs; anything else. You'll be better off.

3 responses

  1. Jean-Baptiste Note says:

    I find this post very true about the quality of Arch (and why I chose it at the time).

    But there are reasons not to switch:

    1/ you've lovingly coded a zillion hook scripts which you'll have to somewhat change for your new tool
    2/ you really want git and realize that there's nothing as sweet as Xtla as far as emacs interfaces go
    3/ 2 years of history is stored into arch and there's no way to export it half correctly

    It may not be only that you need a heads up on the mountain's height. Travelling to other places can be expensive despite the long-term gains.

    JB

  2. Ricky Youngblood says:

    I'm not sure how you can enjoy Gnarls Barkley's entire album. Did you write that for simplicity's sake? Was it to convoluted to explain that even though a few of the tracks are brilliant others just outright suck? TSOPWHBAS has given about 1/2 the album a thumbs down. Anticipated is "Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain" from Sparklehorse which should be modulated near you in the next few weeks.

    Yeah. Screw Arch.

  3. Munchkinguy says:

    I don't mean to be a nudzh, but when will I be able to see the GUADEC archives?

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