Foreign Branches

[Jan Hudec]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 03:14:28 -0400, James Blackwell wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 02:11:40AM +0200, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> > The past few days I've been looking at implementing support for
> > foreign branches (http://bazaar.canonical.com/BzrForeignBranches), in
> > particular with Subversion in mind.
> 
> What sort of plans do you have? Eventually something like?: 
> 
>   bzr branch http://somesite.com/mysvncode/here upstream
>   [ wait a week ]
>   cd upstream
>   bzr pull
> 
> Or even more?: 
>   cd ..
>   bzr branch upstream anotherstream
>   cd anotherstream
>   bzr merge http://somesite.com/mysvncode/here
> 
> If so, that's be frigging AWESOME.. though a bit... large (I imagine this
> eventually turns into a dozen half-reimplimentations of various RCSs into bzr
> format).. I guess you're planning on using plugins of some sort?

Not really. I think this functionality can safely require the other
version control system to be available. What needs to be implemented is
some kind of wrapper interface to unify their invocation.

In perl there is VCP (written by Perforce team, freely avialable) which
does that and svk can use it to branch from CVS and Perforce. I am not
sure that their approach works well for version control systems with
unnamed branches like bzr and it does not seem to record merges either.

So the hard part is actually designing the interface in such a way, that
it can handle fully free-form revision graph like bzr, mercurial, git
and monotone have on one hand and explicitly named branches like
subversion, cvs or perforce have on the other. Plus additional problems
like that subversion can copy files around on arbitrary levels and such.

--
						 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec <bulb at ucw.cz>
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