[cvsnt] Re: modules file examples

[Tony Hoyle]

Oliver Giesen wrote:
> Who says that? Actually I see the main use of alias modules in being a mere
> time saver for checking out multiple modules (physical or virtual alike)
> without having to type as much. As in:
> 
> foo -a bar baz bad whatever
> 
> ...where bar, baz, bad and whatever could be virtually anything from a
> directory to an ampersand module. CVS shouldn't even care. As you noted in
> your reply to Mike, checking out an alias module should simply be (exactly)
> identical to checking out what's to the right of the -a literally. Pretty
> much like a source code macro.

So what happens if you do

foo -a bar &baz

or

foo &bar baz

and other such devious combinations...  I've ascertained that:

foo bar baz

is just broken (it tries to create a file called 'baz' then complains it's 
just disappeared).

The real trick lies in the combinations, which aren't really documented (even 
in the code).  If you have a couple of -d modules and a few ampersand modules 
all mixed together the result seems to be (to me) extremely non-obvious. 
That's what tripped me up last time... I fixed it to work in the way that 
looked obvious and everyone complained that their particular combination had 
stopped working.

In an ideal world I could preparse all the ampersand modules into modules2 
internally, leave the alias module support in (since modules2 doesn't work at 
that level so can't do that) and get rid of most of the cruft from the modules 
system completely.  However I know already it's not that simple - an alias 
module that's embedded within an ampersand module is just not going to parse 
out.

Maybe I'll just forget it and just keep ignoring modules related bugs as I 
have been doing (It's such a mess I daren't touch it even to fix things).

Tony

-- 
Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure.

Tony Hoyle <tmh at nodomain.org>  Key ID: 104D/4F4B6917 2003-09-13
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