[rfc] Readonly/mirror branches

[Robert Collins]

On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 11:55 -0400, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> > I've been thinking about my workspace, and I have a bunch of mirrors of
> > other people's projects. And I was thinking that it would be nice to
> > mark all of those mirrors as non-committable, but that I can update them
> > from their parents.
> > (So pull is allowed, but commit is not).
> 
> I think that bound branches should work for this.  I know that it
> presently doesn't.
> 
> That means that we should fix bzr checkout to work when the source is a
> readonly branch.
> 
> I'm willing to be convinced that mirrors should be something different
> from bound branches, but so far, I haven't heard a convincing argument.

I think there is a semantic difference between mirroring and checking
out a branch. There is no intent to commit to a mirror, and you should
not be able to merge into it, or perform other actions such as commit
--local.

Yes, you can *emulate* this semantic intent with a checkout, as long as
you remember not to do any mutating operations. But its quite a
different intent.

One of the problems we had to address to get both centralised and
decentralised workflow working well was to separate out the intent of
the user from the mechanism: you can emulate update and commit-to-parent
branch by hand, bit its nowhere near as convenient as having an explicit
representation in the tool.

Whether this is implemented as a flag in the branch, or as a different
branch type is an open question as far as I'm concerned. I want to
change the requirement of bind() anyhow - see my other message.

Rob
-- 
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20060509/5381b610/attachment.pgp