What about provide some metadata for branches ?

[Jan Hudec]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 11:35:34 +0100, Nicholas Allen wrote:
> >What would be the *purpose* of that plugin. When do you want to use it? 
> >When
> >do you think others could use it?
> >
> >Basically to get a branch you need to get it's URL somewhere. And I don't
> >expect many people will tell you "there is a branch at
> >http://somewhere.org/some/dir" and don't tell you branch of what it is.
> 
> I see that it could be useful when you have checked out many branches 
> from various OS projects and can't remember what all of them did. It 

That supports more the "branch comment" idea than something like DOAP. Since
if you no longer know what the project is all about, you are unlikely to hack
on it and you really don't need latest devel either, since you are apparently
not using it.

Now a question is, when the branch comment should change. The problem is,
that if you create a branch to use as local mirror, you definitely need to
mirror the comment too (since the most useful situation is when you are
looking for something particular among tens of mirrored branches). But if you
create a branch to start hacking on, you certainly don't want to mirror the
comment, since such comment would no longer be valid.

 - Branch is made a mirror of something via branch and pull operations, so
   these should copy the comment over.

 - Branch diverges from it's parent via commit only, so commit should remove
   the comment *if* it was mirrored by pull or branch.

 - Pull should only overwrite comment if set by previous branch or pull or if
   --overwrite is specified.

A reasonably non-intrusive interface encouraging people to set the branch
comment would be to add it to the commit message editor. There would have to
be a commit message template along the lines of:

  <put a comment here>

  --- END OF COMMIT LOG ---
  --- BRANCH COMMENT - edit to change current branch comment ---
  <whatever branch comment currently is>
  --- END OF BRANCH COMMENT ---
  <there should be status output here or maybe even diff>

There everyone would know there is something like branch comment and could
change it without need to invoke any extra commands (which few people ever
would -- most people don't set branch nicks either (which would be a good
thing to solve the same way -- add a fill-in entry in the commit template)).

> could also be extremely useful for google code searches if google was 
> made aware of bzr repositories (this meta info could be accumulated by 
> the google search engine).

Users don't search for branches. They search for projects and releases. And
the few people who do search for branches search for branches in many other
version control systems (and the number of version control systems is *not*
going to decrease), so it's too small market for google to bother.

That being said, there is one way to use google to search for branches. If
you add a file with some specific contents as part of http-readable branch,
than google will be able to find it by this specific contents and whatever
you are searching for -- this way one could use google to find a location of
Arch branch of that he knew identifier, by matching on keywords appearing in
the log file.

However again asking for detailed info is bound to fail because people will
neglect to fill it in. Maybe exposing the branch nick, comment and history
via some URL google could index from the smart server could be useful. Maybe
it could add latest version of eg. the README file, if it exists in the
branch. This could be done as plugin.


A different, but also useful feature (mostly unrelated to bzr itself) would
be something to simplify making releases. Basically a tool, that would know
different version control systems (bzr, svn, git, darcs, ...), different web
hostings (sourceforge, savannah, berlios, cpan, cheeseshop, ...) and
different directories (freshmeat, linuxgames, cpan, cheeseshop, ...), so you
could give it a DOAP description and a branch/tag and it would export
a tarball, upload it and announce it. That'd be huge project though.

-- 
						 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec <bulb at ucw.cz>
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