tag sharing

[Jesse Rosenthal]

On Thu, 06 Oct 2011 09:56:43 -0300, David Bremner <david at tethera.net> wrote:
> Jesse, do you remember why you decided to roll your own?

Only reason I can remember (a year and a half later) of is that it
seemed like the basic illustration of concept would be a saturday
morning's project. In retrospect, I think the main issue was that I was
trying to figure out how history would be kept. By using git, though,
your idea would be that we get history for free, right?

I think my format was:

    <TIMESTAMP>    <MESSAGID>     <TAG>
    12345          foo at bar        to-fix
    13456          bar at foo        feature-request

But using git would get us timestamps for free too, I guess.  And if we
get rid of timestamps, then we just have dumps. So what we would really
just need is a thin namespacing layer in some scripting language on top
of git? I.e., all we need something to just keep different dumps in
different namespaces, so that when I pull your dump, the tags come in as
`bremner/to-fix` (or whatever our separator is), and then when I dump
all `bremner` tags, it removes the namespace and puts it in
`bremner.tagfile`.

One rather obvious thing that I discovered: processing dumps and
restores from the ui is pretty slow, because you have to output a huge
file, and then find the tags in your preferred namespace. So using
either the library or the bindings would probably speed things up quite
a bit, by only dumping the tags you care about. Which means it couldn't
just be a shell script: it would have to be c/ruby/python.

Best,
Jesse