tags vs branches in a repo

[John A Meinel]

Martin Pool wrote:
> Please poke this straw man:
> 
> We now have repositories which can contain branches; branches are just
> directories containing a small number of control files.  It's cheap and
> (at least relatively) fast to pull or merge between two branches in a
> repository.  You can, with a plugin, list all the branches.
> 
> There are proposals for tags but they are either a bit limited
> (unversioned tags) or have not quite the right semantics (tags created
> by new versions) or introduce substantially more complexity (meta-branch 
> revisions).
> 
> How about instead doing something similar to arch and svn by just making
> a practice of using branches within a repository as tags.  To create or
> update a tag you can pull, pull --overwrite, or merge onto it[*].  This
> makes tags versioned, but without introducing a new time dimension.  And
> we don't have to do a new feature, we can just improve the one we
> already have.
> 
> [*] (Which suggests we should have a merge --overwrite too, which overwrites
> the tree with the merge source.)
> 
> I can think of some drawbacks, which I'll send in a separate post; I'll
> just float this for now.
> 

One of the major problems with svn tags is that they really are
branches. So you can accidentally commit into your 'tag' branch.

Also, I don't think it versions tags all that well. You can version them
in the sense that Arch was able to version them. (tagname revno=1 is tag
 version a, revno=2 is b, etc).

However, the general usage would certainly be different.

And I think Michael has a good point about getting "bzr diff -rtag:foo"
to work properly.

So I think it is doable, but I think a versioned tags file is much more
elegant.

John
=:->


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