[Babase] Problem with documentation line-wrapping -- a policy change

Karl O. Pinc babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Fri, 22 Jul 2005 19:52:43 +0000


Anne,

I've a problem applying my recent changes to the
documentation because you've been following the
rules we laid out and I haven't.  Specifically,
you've been line-wrapping the entire document
and I have not.  Because the line wrapping has
altered most of the lines in the sections I'm
writing there's two independent sets of changes
to the same line and my changes get rejected.

As nobody is using an editor that wraps
all the lines like it or not, there's no
longer any reason for us to line-wrap the entire
document.  Feel free to line-wrap whatever
you're working on at the moment.  If you're
going to be modifying large swaths of text
it's still better to do the line-wrapping
as a separate stand-alone commit to the archive so it
can be undone if necessary.

However, don't line-wrap the entire document.
I've now got diagrams in the document made
up of text that are destroyed when line-wrapped.
If you want to line wrap lots of stuff at once
then use emacs region and exclude the diagrams.

What I'm going to do to recover from my current
problems is to take your last committed change
at it's word "Format paragraphs." and assume
that it's just formatting that was done in that
commit.  I'll undo that commit and send you what
you did in that commit just in case as a diff
file you can look through.  If you want to
try to automatically re-apply parts of the changes
let me know and I'll show you how to use patch,
but don't do the whole thing or the diagrams
will be messed up again.

You will have trouble working from your current
copy of the tree, please do a "tla update" asap
after I commit my changes.  Do a:

   tla changelog | less

To see that I've made two commits, the first
to undo the paragraph formatting and the second
to commit my changes.
If you have made changes since your last commit
you can make a record of them with:

   tla changes --diff > mychanges

(Be sure to do this _before_ the "tla update".)

Then do:

   tla update

I'm not sure there's a point to making your own
record, because your changes will be in a .rej
file anyway if they don't go in.  But that's
how to do it.

Sorry about the confusion.

Karl <kop@meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                  -- Robert A. Heinlein