What about provide some metadata for branches ?

[Simon Rozet]

On Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:12:53 +0100
Jan Hudec <bulb at ucw.cz> wrote:

> 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).
>

I would prefer something like:
  bzr branch-desc "this new branch add Y features to X project"

And then it's stored in .branch/branch.conf

> 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.

I think https://apestaart.org/moap/trac/ is exactly what you are looking for :)

So now, what's next about metadata in bzr ?

-- 
Simon Rozet - http://atonie.org

-- 
Simon Rozet, http://atonie.org/sr