tags vs branches in a repo

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

(...)
> 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).

Notice that even though it feels natural now, at first the
Subversion way to do tags was also not quite the expected way
to do it. They're committed as well, and versioned.

> 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.

Improving the support for branches so that you can use them as tags
is of course a good idea, but I don't think this replaces the tags
feature we've been discussing so far.

For Subversion, I agree it's an elegant way to do it, since we're
always contacting the server in any case, and tags are always there,
in the central repository everyone talks to and depends on.

For bzr, I'd like to have more. I'd like to be able to branch from
something and get into an airplane with every tag in my backpack.
I'd like to be able to add a tag marking something and have other
people carrying it with them once they merge from me. That's the
kind of thing that will make tagging truly useful.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net