Are read-only stores a bug?

Aaron Bentley aaron.bentley at utoronto.ca
Sun Jun 19 20:23:24 BST 2005


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The bzr design is supposed to make it really cheap to branch.  You can
use cp -a to do it, and start committing right away.  Unlike Arch,
branches don't require you to pick a name and assign that name to the
branch forever and ever.  These are good attributes.

The net result is that you wind up with a lot of branches, many of which
you no longer need.  I find I'm often deleting branches because their
changes have been integrated, or because they didn't work out.  And some
are test data that's no longer useful.

But I can't use rm -R to delete them.  Not sanely anyway, because there
are two readonly files for each revision, and one readonly file for
every set of contents a file's ever had.  So rm -Rf it is.

But rm -Rf is a really bad thing to commit to muscle memory.  Only a few
commands come to mind as more dangerous (dd for example).

The likelihood of anyone venturing into .bzr and accidentally deleting
the store contents seems very remote.  So I don't think the stores
actually need to be read-only, and this would avoid teaching users to
type rm -Rf routinely.

If we wanted to keep the stores readonly, I suppose we could have a "bzr
unbranch" command that would only delete bzr branches.

Aaron
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