Format of URLs
[Documentation for users]

FSVS can now use more than 1 URL for update. More...

FSVS can now use more than 1 URL for update.

The given URLs are "overlayed" according to their priority, and they get a name (to ease updating only parts).

Such an extended URL has the form

   ["name:"{name},]["target:"{t-rev},]["prio:"{prio},]URL

where URL is a standard URL known by subversion -- something like http://...., svn://... or svn+ssh://....

The arguments before the URL are optional and can be in any order; the URL must be last.

Example:

   name:perl,prio:5,svn://...

or, using abbreviations,

   N:perl,P:5,T:324,svn://...

Please mind that the full syntax is in lower case, whereas the abbreviations are capitalized!
Internally the : is looked for, and if the part before this character is a known keyword, it is used.
As soon as we find an unknown keyword we treat it as an URL, ie. stop processing.

The priority is in reverse numeric order - the lower the number, the higher the priority. (See url__current_has_precedence() )

Why a priority?

When we have to overlay several URLs, we have to know which URL takes precedence - in case the same entry is in more than one. (Which is not recommended!)

Why a name?

We need a name, so that the user can say "<b>commit all outstanding changes to the repository at URL x</b>", without having to remember the full URL. After all, this URL should already be known, as there's a list of URLs to update from.

You should only use alphanumeric characters and the underscore here; or, in other words, \w or [a-zA-Z0-9_]. (Whitespace, comma and semicolon get used as separators.)

What can I do with the target revision?

Using the target revision you can tell fsvs that it should use the given revision number as destination revision - so update would go there, but not further. Please note that the given revision number overrides the -r parameter; this sets the destination for all URLs.

The default target is HEAD.

Note:

In subversion you can enter URL@revision - this syntax may be implemented in fsvs too. (But it has the problem, that as soon as you have a @ in the URL, you must give the target revision everytime!)

There's an additional internal number - why that?

This internal number is not for use by the user. It is just used to have an unique identifier for an URL, without using the full string.

Note:

On my system the package names are on average 12.3 characters long (1024 packages with 12629 bytes, including newline):

   COLUMNS=200 dpkg-query -l | cut -c5- | cut -f1 -d" " | wc

So if we store an id of the url instead of the name, we have approx. 4 bytes per entry (length of strings of numbers from 1 to 1024). Whereas we'd now use 12.3 characters, that's a difference of 8.3 per entry.

Multiplied with 150 000 entries we get about 1MB difference in filesize of the dir-file. Not really small ...

Currently we use about 92 bytes per entry. So we'd (unnecessarily) increase the size by about 10%.

That's why there's an url_t::internal_number.