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Re: MIME for Dylan sourcecode?
On Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 11:36:33AM -0400, Kim Barrett wrote:
> These are not incompatible requirements. There exist database-like code
> base IDEs which will talk to standard revision control systems.
> VisualAge is a specific example that I've looked at. (Unfortunately, in
> that specific case, VisualAge doesn't (didn't?) talk to CVS because
> VisualAge uses some Microsoft "standard" interface for speaking to
> revision control systems, and there isn't (wasn't?) an implementation of
> that interface for CVS.
And this is basically the heart of the problem. You have to support an
endless variety of version-control systems, pretty-printers, code
generators, documentation generators, text editors, line-count utilities
(!), build systems, and other tools, ranging from the kludgy to the
profound.
If you decide not to store code in text files, your users will want you to
replace all of these tools. And unfortunately, you *can't* replace all of
them, because many of them were developed in-house and perform arcane
tasks.
> Once could imagine an IDE that used a database derived by slurping in text
> files and spitting them back out in some well-defined and reproducible
> form for interaction with a revision control system. That seemed to be
> the direction being discussed during my brief tenure at Harlequin, for
> exactly the reason of playing nicely with other tools.
Exactly. Modern e-mail clients have begun to take a similar approach,
using portable formats for storing e-mail, but building external indeces to
support searchability, cross-referencing, etc.
If the underlying text files get randomly modified behind the e-mail
client's back, it discards the indices.
Cheers,
Eric
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