[RFC] New name for 'repositories' - 'baskets'

Jan Hudec bulb at ucw.cz
Fri Feb 24 21:07:57 GMT 2006


Hello All,

Today there was a lenghty discussion caused by confusion whether stand-alone
branch has a repository or not. Ie. whether the place where stand-alone
branch stores revision data is called a repository or not.

In user level descriptions, we would like to not call it that, but:
- The object representing that place is called a repository in the code and
  thus it's also called it that way in technical discussions.
- Users are likely to expect 'repository' to mean 'where revision data live',
  which is not exactly it, because that includes the stand-alone branch.

Therefore I proposed that the user-level concept should be renamed.
JBlack suggested the term "basket". So the command would be 'make-basket'
instead of 'make-repository' and all documentation would talk about baskets
rather than repositories.

I think that calling 'repository'(user-level) something else is good because:
- Users comming from centralized systems will be used to repository as
  a fundamental unit of versioned data, but it's not. Rather a branch is.
  'repository'(user-level) is just an optimization.
- 'repository'(user-level) is supposed to be used for setups really strange
  for what users will likely expect, like having checkouts in the repository.

Besides I think it is better to say (in BzrForCVSUsers tutorial):
  There are 'baskets' which you can use like CVS 'repositories'.
and describe how exactly they work than something like:
  Bzr has 'repositories', that work similarly to CVS, but...
(and describing how exactly they work, of course).
Because users will not tend to mix the concepts until they fully understand
them in the former case, but very probably will in the later.

Of course the other way around would be possible as well -- it would mean to
rename the Repository object to Store and replace repository with store in
all method names, because otherwise there would still be confusion between
'repository'(user-level) and 'repository'(code-level).
I however think that the 'repository'(code-level) matches the
'repository'(CVS) meaning better and should thus be the one to keep the term.

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