A few questions/potential issues in Bazaar-NG

[John A Meinel]

Matthieu Moy wrote:
> Wouter van Heyst <larstiq at larstiq.dyndns.org> writes:
> 
> 
>>You can make your branch available to the outside world if you have
>>access to a webserver, Bazaar-NG itself can be found at:
>>
>>	http://bazaar-ng.org/bzr/bzr.dev/ 
> 
> 
> I knew that, but AFAIK, currently, bzr can write only on local
> archives, can be exported with rsync, and can be accessed through
> HTTP.
> 
> Also, I suppose the current file-store archive format is easier to
> make transactional. I don't know how concurrent accesses can be
> managed with the weave format on a dumb fileserver.
> 

I recently submitted a patch which would allow remote writing. Over 
different protocols. Probably the first one to get real support will be 
sftp, since as a protocol it is quite advanced, at least if people start 
supporting the latest draft. :)

Right now, I have an RsyncTransport and SftpTransport which just calls 
out to the associated executable. So they are far from optimum (for 
instance if you don't have ssh keys you would have to type your password 
multiple times for a checkout or update). But in general they work.
bzr still needs a bit of work to actually make remote branches writable, 
but not a whole lot.

You've said a few times about bzr using weaves, and to my knowledge, 
that is just one possibility. There are a few of us which are concerned 
about how weaves would work. I think both Aaron Bentley and I prefer 
'revfiles' which I think are from mercurial. Which are append-only and a 
mix of deltas and full texts, which should be fully possible to do 
safely over sftp.

> 
>>How simple exactly is hosting a GNU Arch archive?
> 
> 
> You can access an archive for read and write, potentially concurrent,
> the same way for ftp, sftp, WebDAV, and local archives. HTTP archives
> are off course read-only.
> 
> (The WebDAV is a typical useless feature for 95% of the world, but it
> is THE killer feature for people like me often working behind a
> firewall with HTTP proxy).
> 

I think web-dav would be possible, and probably pretty easy to do (my 
patch adds a pfs-like layer). But I don't really know webdav, or have a 
need to implement it. Though I'm guessing if it is desirable, it will be 
done.

John
=:->
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