tags in bzr

[Erik Bågfors]

On 5/13/05, Martin Pool <mbp at sourcefrog.net> wrote:
> > So.. what do you all think? If you want it the same way as I do, I
> > might be willing to implement it even.  It's quite an important
> > feature for us.
> 
> I think we should do this, despite my earlier reservations.  What
> you've listed here should be reasonably simple.

Great! :)
 
> There are just a few open issues:
> 
> - What names are allowed for tags?  I am inclined to say that, like
>   programming language identifiers, they can't start with a digit so
>   that we can distinguish them from revision numbers and pass both to -r.

Two choices.
1) Use separate commandline for them. Such as --tag.  Then they can
have any name or
2) Can't start with a digit (or maybe, must contain a alphabetical
character) so that we can distinguish them.
 
> - Should tags propagate across merges?  I think yes; people may have
>   to adopt some conventions to avoid getting too many conflicts, such
>   as starting personal-use tags with their username.

Yes, 

> - Are tags themselves versioned, and if so how?  The simplest thing is
>   to say, no, they're not versioned.  Perhaps placing a tag should
>   create a new revision, but that has the strange side-effect that if
>   you check out a tag, you can no longer see the tag because it
>   doesn't exist yet.

Well... I would like to be able to place a tag on a old revision.  So
I don't think they should create a new revision. Rather they should be
an alias for a revision.

The way I see it used (among other ways) are:
- ohh... I fixed that in revision 254 let me tag that
$ bzr tag -r 254 'bug#123'

- Great, then I'll pull that to my branch
$ bzr merge --tag 'bug#123' http://....... (or pull..???)

But then the next questions are 
* Should a tag be globaly unique?
* Should you be able to move tags (I guess they need to be versioned then)

Cheers,
Erik