bzr questions

[John A Meinel]

Jordan Breeding wrote:
> Another thing I thought of asking:
> 
> Does bzr support tags (possibly a similar model to mercurial)?
> 
> If it doesn't, are they something people see as beneficial?
> 
> Jordan
> 

Well, bzr plans to support tags as a named revision. So that rather than 
saying:

bzr diff -r revid:john at arbash-meinel.com-200504070071-134eoa123414..

You could say:

bzr diff -r tag:rel-0-5

It is currently undecided how tags should work, since there are a lot of 
possible factors.
	Do you allow tags to be updated,
	If so, do you keep track of the old forms
	Do you copy the tags when you branch
	What happens during merge, can the tags conflict
	If the do conflict, how is it resolved?

etc.

One of the big issues is that tags aren't really versioned data, since 
they aren't in your working tree. But if you allow updating them, then 
you should probably keep track of the old values for a tag. If you make 
them versioned like everything else, then backing up to an older version 
of the branch would give you an older version of the tag (which you 
probably don't want)
So how should you store the history of tag values?
And when you branch, probably you want to copy the tags over, but if 
they have been updated, merging gets tricky.

I think someone a while back came up with a plugin to implement tags, 
and they might have even implemented the tag: namespace. (though I don't 
think it went that far).

I have some ideas about how to solve these, and I'm sure I'm not the 
only one. But as of yet, nobody has worried enough to implement the feature.

John
=:->
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