Recording branch points

[Martin Pool]

On 17 Oct 2006, David Allouche <david at allouche.net> wrote:

> > Right now there is enough information to infer branch points very
> > reliably using the branch nick field. By default it should do a plenty
> > accurate job, with only occasional false positives (user renames a
> > branch), and false negatives (user repurposes an existing directory for
> > another task, while branching it to somewhere else to continue
> > development on the old branch).
> > 
> > I'd want to see a pretty thorough analysis of the failure modes that
> > will leak up to the UI before I would be convinced of the safety and
> > tastefulness of adding a branch point marker per se.
> 
> Very simple.
> 
> By default, the nick of a branch is the basename of its location.
> 
> By default, bzr branch preserves the basename of the branch.
> 
> Using only default behaviour, the branch nick is useless to track branch
> points.

I think it's clear from the previous discussion that we are trying to
capture user intention.  To get this really accurately, rather than just
inferring it, we need to get the user to think about what they're going
to do with the new copy.  Will it be a mirror or reference copy of
something else?  Or if not, what will be in there?  This is what the
branch nick describes.

Perhaps we should encourage the user to think more about this.  There
are a few ways - we could make them specify a destination name, or
recommend that in the documentation, or add a --nick flag to set that
independent of the directory name.

-- 
Martin