Third party developers

Third-party developers have more flexibility and power under arch than they did with CVS.

Downloading from the read-only archives

$ tla register-archive http://www.lnx-bbc.com/arch
$ tla get lnx-bbc-devel@zork.net--gar/lnx-bbc--stable--2.1

Then hack away. Feel free to branch off for your own changes as described earlier in this document.

Generating a changeset tarball for us to merge in

$ tla changes -o ,,my-illustrious-changes
$ tar czvf my-illustrious-changes.tar.gz ,,my-illustrious-changes

Publishing your own archive for us to star-merge or replay from

If you branch off of the mirror and publish your branch as described elsewhere in this document, the LNX-BBC developers can then look at your entire revision history. This is far more powerful than receiving a changeset in e-mail, as we get to play with your archive.

Archive Syndication

We now have Planet LNX-BBC to keep track of development in various distributed branches. If you wish to have your archive's lnx-bbc branches appear on the planet page, the easiest way is for you to generate the rss out of cron.

First: get tla-rss.sh from the scripts category.

$ tla register-archive http://www.lnx-bbc.com/arch
$ tla get scripts--gargoyle-bin

(You can use your sftp archive for this as well)

Then set up a cron job to run tla-rss.sh regularly with an appropriate archive and archzoom URL. If you do not wish to install archzoom on your system, lnx-bbc.com can be made to perform its functions (albeit inefficiently).

*/10 * * * *    $HOME/bin/tla-rss.sh -n 25 -u http://psax.org/~dave/archzoom/archzoom.cgi dave@psax.org--projects/lnx-bbc > $HOME/public_html/rss/lnx-bbc.rss

This will make an RSS file every ten minutes with the 25 most recent commmits from each lnx-bbc-- branch in Dave Barry's archive (provided you have registered dave@psax.org--projects). You can specify full version IDs to tla-rss.sh (to specify one branch in isolation), but to date you cannot give it category--branch without also specifying a version.

Finally, come up with a code hobo (A.K.A. hackergotchi head) to appear by your commits. George Moffitt describes the process for turning a cropped head image into a hackergotchi using the GIMP:

I make four copies of the head, layered atop one another. At that point it looks like one head. Then I blur the second layer down by about 5, the next layer beneath that by about 10, and the bottom one by about 15; so you get a nice blur around the edge, but the regular face image is on top.

Make sure the image is a PNG that fades to a transparent background (with alpha channels and all) and that you scale it to 100x100. Also, if you would like your archive to have a special background image beneath the code hobo (such as we do for the official research and stable branches), please make sure that is scaled to 100x100 (though it can be in any format you like).

Locations of common developer archive mirrors

Nick Moffitt	http://zork.net/~nick/arch/
"Yosemite" Sam Phillips	http://dasbistro.com/~sam/archives/gar/
Nate "inkblot" Riffe	http://www.movealong.org/~inkblot/arch/projects-2004
Dave "Psykoyiko" Barry	http://psax.org/~dave/arch