[RFC] quickbranch

[Keir Mierle]

On Tue, May 23, 2006 at 10:09:14PM -0400, Martin Pool wrote:
> 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?  

Done. Also added a second cache function that should work on Windows (but is
probably slower than the tar-based one) 

Keir