Centralized storage in bzr

[Aaron Bentley]

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Martin Pool wrote:
> On 13 Jun 2005, Aaron Bentley <aaron.bentley at utoronto.ca> wrote:
> 
>>So if optional centralized storage is a good idea, how do we hold on to
>>as many of the advantages of independent branches as we can?
>>
>>1. a branch can be specified with one url
>>2. working trees can be moved around easily with mv
>>3. working trees can be seamlessly branched using cp
>>4. branches do not use filesystem properties that NTFS lacks
> 
> 
> The other property I'd add is that it should be hard to unexpectedly
> lose information.

Sure.  Are you saying you think it's easier to unexpectedly lose
information for centralized branches?  Could you expand?

Every now and then, I want to blow away a working tree like I could with
Arch, knowing that I wouldn't lose the branch data doing so.  Sometimes
it's because I'm done working on the branch, and other times, it's


> At the moment I have in mind a perhaps more conservative approach of a
> search path for objects.

> These other branches are strictly read-only, used just as a local
> lookaside cache.

Sure, we can do that.  It seems like an awkward way of doing it, though.
 I'd like a way for it to happen easily and smoothly.

>>So users just have to ensure that $ANYPATH is remotely accessible, and
>>bzr clients just need to look at $ANYPATH/branches/branch3/../../stores
>>to get the storage.
> 
> 
> So do you mean each working directory would include a file containing
> ANYPATH, and history wouldn't normally be stored in the working
> directory?

Yes, the idea was to have the working tree store working tree data,
branch id and last-committed-revision.  The branch data would be stored
centrally.

> This seems a lot like the idea of "bound branches" -- branches whose
> history is stored elsewhere, possibly in a place shared between
> multiple working copies.  I think that will be good for some
> situations but I don't think it should be the default.

It's somewhat like bound branches, because those also had the
requirement that you should be able to get the branch from just one URL.
 But AIUI, those have a fixed location and so they can't be branched
with cp.  Also, from IRC discussion, I thought that with bound branches
you could choose either to the working directory or to the bound
location, which would mean that there would be branch history stored in
the working tree too.

Aaron
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