[PATCH] Branch and pull-- now with remote

[Erik Bågfors]

On 5/29/05, Martin Pool <mbp at sourcefrog.net> wrote:
> On 29 May 2005, Aaron Bentley <aaron.bentley at utoronto.ca> wrote:
> > As it turns out, there's not much more to be done to support remote
> > branches.
> >
> > This updated patch adds the ability to branch and pull from remote
> > branches.  So now, this does work:
> > $ bzr branch http://www.bazaar-ng.org/bzr/bzr.dev
> >
> > It's just that it works pretty slowly, because it's not pipelined.
> 
> I was thinking about pipelining.  In many cases we do know in advance
> a number of files that we'll want to fetch down.  These can be either
> pipelined onto a single HTTP connection, or spread across multiple
> connections.

I think this is needed. Especially for other types of storage.  Just
for fun, I created readonly support for ssh:// type urls in
remotebranch.py. It was very simple to do with "ssh user at host cat
file" instead of the http url reading. Then the rest of the code could
be the same.  I then merged this with Aarons merge code and could do
"bzr branch ssh://localhost//tmp/bzr.dev ".  This was VERY VERY slow,
because of starting a ssh for each file.  It took over 20 min to get
the whole branch.  If it would be possible to do this in one, or just
a few, ssh commands I think it would be great.

The branch command sometimes gets the same file three times, so that
ofcourse adds to the time it takes.

Getting somewhat off-topic here.  When it comes to remote branches.  I
know you Martin has been talking about having inteligence on both
sides of the pipe. I think this would be a good idea, however, I also
think that it's needed to have support for remote dumb storage.

Check out the darcs mailinglist for the number of people who wants to
put a branch up on a remote drive either trough ftp or to their ISP
that doesn't have darcs installed.  Having support for dumb storage
would give them the option of using bzr instead of darcs.

Cheers,
Erik
ps. BTW have you seen darcs-git? darcs running of a git storage, they
really want Linus to use darcs :)