Recipes vs. Looms

[James Westby]

On Tue Dec 15 03:19:34 +0000 2009 Andrew Bennetts wrote:
> There is a bit of a transparency problem with looms when compared with
> recipes.  With a recipe all the data about the recipe is there in a single,
> flat text file.  With a loom it's a bit harder to see what precisely it's
> recorded (developers may know precisely how a 'thread' represented
> internally, but users don't).  It's harder to see the history of the loom
> state (what 'bzr record' does).  It's not trivial to see the precise
> ancestry relations of all the threads (a sufficiently smart 'bzr qlog' or
> 'bzr viz' could help here), but the ancestry matters to some extent when
> doing 'bzr up-thread'.  Another example is how can I know if a loom here has
> precisely the same state as a loom somewhere else (and how can I know if the
> differences matter)?
> 
> Ideally looms would be fully intuitive and users won't care about this level
> of detail.  But abstractions tend to leak, especially when a tool still has
> many rough edges.  So as much I like looms, I think recipes currently have a
> bit of an advantage in terms of explainability and predictability. 

I think these are great comments, thanks.

One thing I have considered is providing a way to edit a loom via a recipe
description of it. You could produce the flat text file version as required,
then have a command that makes the loom like an edited version.

I'm not sure this would be either helpful of useful though.

Thanks,

James