An idea to make it simple for people to contribute.

[Erik Bågfors]

Hi.

Last night I just got an idea that I have heard talk about in the
darcs community.  I guess that doesn't really make it my idea :)

The idea is that any project that is using bzr for it's development
can add a bzr-metadata file in the root of the source distribution
(maybe as a flag to export?). Than that metadata file can be used to
build a partial repository without history but still with enough
information to be able to use bzr and contribute using bzr.

For example, here is an idea on how a contributor would work

$ tar xzvf helloworld-1.0.tar.gz 
This tar contains a bzr metadata file as well as a readme that
explains how to contribute using bzr.


$ cd helloworld-1.0
$ bzr init

This bzr init (maybe it should be called something else). Reads the
metadata file and gets information about from which branch the source
came, which files in the source-tree are versioned, what revno it is,
where to send patches etc.

So, directly after this init you get a branch with all interesting
files added, etc.

>From this point the user can do all normal commands, bzr log will not
show much since there is no log, you can't back up to earlier
revisions either. But what the user can do is:

$ vi hello.c
$ bzr commit -m "fixed spelling on 'world'"
$ vi gtkhello.c
$ bzr add gtkhello.c
$ bzr commit -m " added gtk version of hello world"
$ bzr send

The user could also choose to do a 
$ bzr pull 

(or whatever it should be called) to update, directory from the source
tree, to a later revision than the release.

Basically, this would be a way to generate a partial checkout of the
branch directly from the source tree.

What do you think? I think this would really be very very cool.

/Erik