Scope of operations

[James Blackwell]

On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 11:58:15AM +1000, Robert Collins wrote:
> 
> I'm starting to think that we are over emphasising the full tree aspects
> of our internals.
> 
> I think that (unlike svn) its important that we have a full-tree
> approach to what makes up a branch. That is, that the entire tree
> comprises the branch; that a file only appears once within the branch.
> The concept of subtrees going off in different directions in svn breaks
> my brain. Tags should be global to the tree for instance.

In all fairness, I've frequently heard the question from svn users on
whether or not sub tree operations are supported. 

> But, I know that users often want to work on a small part of their code
> at once, and it follows that operations like log/revert/commit/annotate
> (and, if weave shows its potential, perhaps pull and merge), should work
> on the part of the branch they are working in. Yes, they can commit
> something that does not work, but they can always just commit the rest
> too.
>
> Its certainly possible using configs (in some flavour) to achieve that
> between clearly separate projects, and there is a need in the future to
> allow easy separation and joining of trees. But I don't think that users
> should need to split their tree to get this convenience.

The people that ask for this seem to generally want to have things like
"bzr get subtree". I think that's a reasonable request, though it would be
a bit difficult to implement with the ... "hashing" thats being done with
weave storage.