[RFC] quickbranch

[Martin Pool]

On 22 May 2006, Keir Mierle <keir at cs.toronto.edu> wrote:
> I'm new to bzr, and sadly my introduction was not great; I branched bzrtools
> and it took 4 hours. Since properly fixing the speed problem is not trivial, I
> thought I'd cook up a stopgap plugin hack: make branching work at the speed of
> the network. The plugin sacrifices commit speed for branch speed. The idea is
> simple: at every commit, tar the branch into .bzrcache.tar.gz. This way when
> someone wants to branch, they merely need to get a single tar file, avoiding
> the need for rsync. The plugin also adds a quickbranch command which knows to
> look for the .bzrcache.tar.gz file for fast branching.
> 
> The current code is extremely rough, but I thought I'd toss it out to see what
> people think of the idea. If people think this is reasonable I'll put more time
> into it (and make it work on Windows).
> 
> http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~keir/quickbranch/quickbranch.py
> Instructions:
>  1) Drop quickbranch.py in your .bazaar/plugins directory
>  2) Add bzrlib.plugins.quickbranch.cache_branch to your post_commit hook
>  3) bzr quickbranch http://url/here

It looks like a pretty useful concept, and probably a good stopgap.
Could you please add it to the plugin registry on the wiki?  

A more general form of this would look, I think, a bit more like git's
pack files.  It would be good if we could wrap all of history up to some
point into a self-contained file which could be brought down in one
piece.  Perhaps something to think about for a future format.

-- 
Martin