bzr push, working directory, bzrtools

[Matthieu Moy]

John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> writes:

> I don't believe most other SCM tools just have the working tree
> available for download (SVN and CVS don't, Arch doesn't, I'm not sure
> about darcs/bk/etc).

True, but you're doing an unfair comparaison: most other SCM tools do
not have the "repository == working tree" idea at all. So, the users
are not used to this idea, and have no problem with having an archive
without working tree. That's just the normal behavior there.

The push command just landed in the mainline, and there is already
several messages of surprised users (I was also surprised, but since I
took part in the discussion, I understood quickly what was happening).
I now think there is a need for a push that pushes the working tree.


An interesting application of the "repository == working tree" + http
access it to maintain a website with an SCM. For example,

  http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/repos/ion-scripts-3/

is a small website, and it is ALSO a darcs repository. For example,
you can access manually

  http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/repos/ion-scripts-3/_darcs/inventory

If you have automatic directory listing on the webserver for example,
you can distribute a project consisting in a small set of files by
just publishing the archive. No need for a cron job or a hook to
update the distribution website.


Performance-wise, it shouldn't be catastrophic since you can compute
the list of files to access with only the local and remote inventory.
Still, it would be nice to have an option to disable (or disable by
default) the push of the working tree to be faster.

An --override option, to override the files without merging could be
nice too (when pushing to a location when you know you never edit
manually).

-- 
Matthieu