archives & nested trees

[John A Meinel]

Robert Collins wrote:
> It occurs to me that one common use of nested-by-reference trees, and
> archives, will be to have a common library in the same archive as
> several users. If the interpretation of .bzr-child-locations was
> performed relative to the branch, not the working dir, then paths
> like ../../libs/libfoo would allow references inside the same archive,
> and avoid some need to provide absolute urls.
> 
> John - what do you think?

I definitely think that there will be cases of using a shared library in
an archive. And it would be nice to be able to reference the sibling
branch that way.
However, I think you could still reference the sibling branch by
absolute path, and other people would be able to get it, and it means
that it would work without archives.

I'm also thinking that maybe it should be .bzr/child-locations, and not
actually be versioned.

Otherwise, I would switch entirely to the reference being within an
archive, and relative to the archive root. Basically, it brings back a
real namespace, where an archive is named by its path, and branches are
named as paths inside of archives.
Though this brings us back to having a complete path for any branch,
both inside or outside of an archive.
If you move it, everything breaks anyway.

The only advantage to having it relative is that if I mirror your
archive, then the relative paths stay the same in my tree, versus what
they are in your tree.

What I feel we are really missing is the concept of archive names, which
can then point to whatever you have registered. Since right now, the
full archive path is its name, and thus we don't have a way to point it
to somewhere else.
There has been some discussion about using aliases, both for shortening
the full path, but also to say that "foo wants to go to path/X, but I
know that path/Y can be substituted for path/X".
The substitution helps if someone publishes an archive, and says go to
"sftp://somewhere/path/to/here" and I know that I really want to get it
at "http://somewhere/here".

If we want to go back to named archives, with named mirrors, we can. But
I'm certainly not settled that that is the best way to go. (For example,
it makes having standalone branches difficult).
We could make the naming optional. Where everything can be referenced by
full path, but if you happen to have an archive named, it can also be
referenced by that.

I'm not sure how to solve it, such that we give equal value to both
standalone branches and archives.
It might be best if references in child-locations can be either absolute
or relative. In a standalone branch, they must be absolute, in an
archive, they can be relative to the root of the archive.

John
=:->

> 
> Rob


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