default nickname

[John Arbash Meinel]

David I. Lehn wrote:
> * John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> [2005-12-19T18:24:26-0500]:
> 
>>I don't mind the default nick the way it is. My personal preference
>>would be for it to grab more directories.
>>I'd like to work in dev/bzr/jam-integration, but for nick sake, I work
>>in dev/bzr/bzr-jam-integration
>>
> 
> 
> I'd just leave out my initials and call the dir dev/bzr/int.  ;)  Which
> would make a poor nick for public consumption.
> 
> What are nicks for anyway?

They are a small way to get names back into branches. Without nicks, you
have no branch naming committed as revision information. So if I do:

bzr branch bzr.dev bzr-feature-foo

cd bzr-feature-foo
bzr commit -m "Adding stuff"

cd ../bzr.dev
bzr merge ../bzr-feature-foo

At this point, you have a revision in bzr.dev (as a merge), but you
don't know that it was actually created as part of 'feature-foo'. That
is what nicks are for.

The reason we use directory names, is that if you couple email address
and directory name, you are very close to having a unique identifier for
the branch. So if you look at an annotation of a file, you can see that
this line was added in the feature-foo branch, and this other one was in
feature-baz. And these were in John Meinel's integration branch, and
those were in Robert's integration branch.

I believe other scms (monotone) support explicitly naming the branch. We
are just allowing an implicit name by using the current directory if no
name has been set.

Does "bzr nick ''" set an empty nickname?
> 
> 
> 
>>I wouldn't mind if we had a couple policies that you could set in your
>>global config. So the default nick could either be 0 directories
>>(empty), 1 directory (default), or 2+ directories (my setup).
>>
> 
> 
> How much complexity should this simple field support?  Defaulting to
> using dir names for metadata sounds like a tla-ism.  Arguments can be
> made you may want deep dir naming on some projects and not others.
> Supporting all that seems like a mess.  Especially since I don't know
> why nicks are needed. ;)

Well, we could certainly just have a way to set a default naming scheme.
One of which could be None.

Whether this is settable by a configuration option, or a plugin, I don't
really care, but I would like it to be configurable.

> 
> -dave
> 

Does that help you understand? Do you completely disagree with the
philosophy?

John
=:->
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 256 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20051219/d4f6be88/attachment.pgp