[RFC] Re: Get the diff between two remote revisions

[Matthieu Moy]

Well, it seems this message didn't have much success.

I'll ask it more directly: If I implement a revision:N:/path/to/branch
revision spec for bzr.dev, does it have a chance to be included in
upstream?

Thanks for your comments.

Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy at imag.fr> writes:

> Hi,
>
> This is a question that I've asked multiple times here, but I didn't
> get a satisfactory answer.
>
> The simple case: How can I get the diff between, say, revision 42 and
> 44 in branch http://site.com/path/to/branch? Do I have to create a
> local mirror for that?
>
> The general case: Instead of two revisions of the same branch, how can
> I get the diff between two arbitrary revisions? For example, revision
> 42 in /home/me/branch and revision 12 in http://site.com/branch?
>
> I need the simple case to implement a remote branch explorer in DVC [1]:
> display a buffer with the list of revisions (roughly, $(bzr log)), and
> the user can type '=' on any revision to get the diff between this
> revision and the previous one.
>
> In the past, I had proposed to add a revision spec for that, which
> would allow something like
>
>   bzr diff -r revision:42:/home/me/branch..revision:12:http://site.com/branch
>
> and I even had a draft implementation for that. The advantages were:
>
> * a single string can identify any revision. For DVC, it would make
>   the code very simple, and it allows shell scripts to do things like
>   "bzr ... -r ${REVISION}" with REVISION being a string obtained in
>   various ways.
>
> * It is easily regexp-matchable. For DVC + Gnus [2], I was thinking
>   about making revision:N:BRANCH clickable (as we do already for
>   A/c--b--v for GNU Arch).
>
> My implementation was not satisfactory for at least one reason : It
> needed to fetch the remote revisions locally, which means that you
> couldn't run "bzr diff -r revision:1:/path/..revision:2:/otherpath/"
> from outside a branch, and that it would fetch unrelated revisions in
> the local branch otherwise. I suppose the work on checkouts allows
> something much better, since bzr diff ran in a checkout is already
> able to work with a remote branch. (note: the "branch:" revision
> specifier still fetches the revisions, but this is arguably a good
> thing in this case)
>
> Conceptually, some people didn't like having a notion of branch in a
> revision identifier. But first, if we accept this argument, then
> "branch:" specifier should be removed, and then, I don't accept this
> argument. When I give the location of the file, I don't give only the
> filename, I usually include the directory. And I think directories are
> containers for files as well as branches are containers for revisions.
>
> Among the other proposed solutions, were:
>
>   bzr diff --branch /path/to/branch -r 42 \
>            --branch http://site.com/branch -r 12
>
> and
>
>   bzr diff /path/to/branch,revision=42 \
>            http://site.com/branch,revision=12
>
> or something like this.
>
> It would be nice if a decision could be taken on this point. If I get
> time, I'll work on an implementation.
>
> Thanks,

-- 
Matthieu