On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Daniel Vainsencher wrote:

> > ViewMC in fact grew up around the configuration interface for
> > this tool (and if you want to receive commit emails for any repository on
> > sqf.org, let me know and I'll add you).
> Yes, actually put me in for all of them, filtering is easy.

Ok, you probably just got a flood of them as I started up the notification
system for the first time and every package will look "new" to it (hm,
this may be a problem then the machine reboots as well).

> I'm not sure what happens when I open a remote version - is it cached?

Yes - but it's cached by UUID, not filename (which isn't guaranteed to be
unique).  So when opening a .mcz file from a remote repository, you still
have to load enough of the file to get the UUID.  At that point you can
look up the full Version, if you have it. The cache is mostly useful when
doing diffs or merges, when you're doing a lookup by UUID to begin with.

> what IS the "cache" repository type, now that I think of it?

It's an in-image repository (MCDictionaryRepository).  I'm not actually
sure how useful it is in practice, except that the test cases use it... I
admit in almost all cases I'd rather have the version dumped to a local
directory than kept in the image.

> I was just thinking that for heavy users, loading all remotely generated
> versions of packages they're interested in is not that big a deal, as
> long as old version are cached.

One possibility we've been discussing is to have downloading all versions
be the normal method of operation - that is, the main UI for
opening/loading/merging etc would be built around a browser for a local
version storage, and MC would periodically just dump any new versions
from remote repositories into this.  This browser could then color code
revisions according to whether they're newer or older than your current
one, provide views by package/repository/author, etc.

I know Julian's a little bit uneasy about this idea, but it's possible
that as long as you *can* still cherry-pick individual versions from
remote repositories, he'll let me get away with it. :)