Message-ID: <41812887.9010605@panoramicfeedback.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 13:12:39 -0400
From: Aaron Bentley <abentley@panoramicfeedback.com>
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To: Mikhael Goikhman <migo@homemail.com>
Cc: gnu-arch-users@gnu.org
Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Announce: axp - a new command line tool
References: <20041028155630.GA21846@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG>
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Nice to have a new face on the field.

Mikhael Goikhman wrote:

> Question: Is axp a competitor of fai and xtla?
> 
> Answer: Not exactly, the ideology is a bit different. Unlike these tools,
> there is no intention to replace tla and a shell. The current focus is on
> the report functionality and the operations one usually puts in crontab.

It sounds more like a competitor of tlacontrib or tla-tools, actually. 
What do you mean by report functionality?

> I may also add commands that I miss in tla, like fork and star-merge-undo.
> So, certain intersection with fai is possible, but this is not necessarily
> a bad thing. In any case, axp is intended to be used alongside with tla,  
> so it is not quite a tla wrapper, but a multi-purpose arch extension tool.

I'd say there's actually quite a lot of overlap: fork, registry and 
star-merge-undo functionality are all provided by Fai.  If you want to 
support aba commands, it should be too hard-- their simple protocol is 
descibed here: http://sourcecontrol.net/~abentley/fai/adding_commands.php

Conversely, it'll be quite easy for me to add axp commands to Fai, if 
they're tasty.

Fai doesn't have an explicit registry command, though.  When it 
encounters an unregistered archive name, it automatically looks it up. 
You can do "fai get random@unregistered/foo--bar", and it just works.

You might want to add Gergely Nagy's registry too-- Fai will use it for 
lookups, and offer to submit manually-entered locations to it, so it's a 
useful adjunct to the supermirror.  (For example, 
lord@emf.net--gnu-arch-2004 is there, but not on the supermirror yet.)

Aaron

-- 
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
Panometrics, Inc.