post 0.8 development

[Martin Pool]

On  8 May 2006, John A Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
> >  - Something to help me to deal with a relatively large number of 
> >branches in a repository. Arch had this c--b--v which I (and others) 
> >didn't like, but I think bzr can provide something useful. It's already 
> >possible to have a directory structure inside a repository :
> >--repo/
> >   +--projectA/
> >   |    +--> main-branch/
> >   |    +--> old-stable-branch/
> >   |    `--> short-life-branch/
> >   `--Other-project/
> >       ...
> >I don't know exactly what bzr should provide more. At least, browsing 
> >the list of branches, and perhaps a regexp filter could be useful. I 
> >mean the kind of thing doable with a few lines of shell, find and grep 
> >on a local filesystem, but through the bzr transport layer (at least on 
> >transports supporting directory listing).
> 
> You're thinking something like 'bzr browse', right?
> I could see a tool that just does a recursive transport.list_dir(), and 
> looks for '.bzr' directories. That would actually work for both 
> repositories, and collections of standalone branches.
> 
> The problem is that the round-trip overhead is probably murderous. You 
> have a 'list_dir()' call for each directory, and then a 'stat' call for 
> every entry (to determine if it is a file or a directory).

Perhaps a reasonable compromise is to just insist the branches be at the
top level, rather than recursing down; we'd then recommend to organize
them as projectA--main or projectA.main or projectA-main.

-- 
Martin