2.2 Pick a Default Archive Location
You Will Probably Create Many Archives
When you use arch, you will create many archives.
Point of Comparison
An arch archive roughly corresponds to a CVS or Subversion repository: it's the database where sources and changes are recorded.
Most other systems encourage deployments in which there are many programmers, but just a few archives or repositories. Arch, on the other hand, encourages deployments in which many programmers create many archives of their own: many programmers, but many more archives.
Archives are "cheaper" in arch than in those other systems. You can set one up quickly; you can branch from one archive to another; you can merge as easily between two archives as within a single archive.
Put All Your Archives in One Place
By default, stick all of your archives in a single directory.
Let's pretend that you choose the directory ~/archives
. Then
this manual assumes that you have run:
% mkdir ~/archives % ARCHIVE_DIR="$(cd ~/archives; pwd)" % export ARCHIVE_DIR
In other words, throughout the documentation, examples of shell
commands (and similar) will use the string $ARCHIVE_DIR
to refer
to a directory in which you create your own archives.
Don't Be Confused!
tla
does not itself use the environment variableARCHIVE_DIR
.The examples in this section use an environment variable so that it can be referred to by later sections and to illustrate the best-practice that you should designate a default location for your archives.
Copyright
Copyright (C) 2005 Tom Lord (lord@emf.net
)
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this software; see the file COPYING
. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, 675
Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.