A GNU Arch Handbook

2.2 Pick a Default Archive Location

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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 variable ARCHIVE_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.

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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.

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