[RFC] Bundles as repositories

[Robert Collins]

On Thu, 2007-06-14 at 22:17 -0700, Wichmann, Mats D wrote:
> bazaar-bounces at lists.canonical.com wrote:
> > I think this has been roughly discussed, but wanted to be sure it
> > had.. 
> > 
> > I think we want a compact binary bundle format, with the human text
> > overall delta just an ignored-prelude. 
> 
> I read this and I'm not getting all of it, I suppose.
> Is this proposing moving completely away from the
> "bundle as a rich patch" type format?  

We have two use cases for bundles. One is for users, the other is for
bzr-bzr communication. AIUI the current plan is to make the rich-patch
parts of the bundle be optional - so I was purely talking about the
bzr-bzr aspects.

> Or is it, as
> the above seems to indicate, the patch-like stuff is
> in the bundle so humans can use it for reviewing, 

Right.

> but that stuff is not used directly by the tools?

Currently it is used by the tools; and thats part of the problem: its
not linefeed safe because newlines get normalised in the rich patch and
it fails checksums.

> The latter is much better than the former, but binary
> things tend to get broken by emailing (which is going
> to happen with bundles) no matter how cautious you
> are so I'd still be rather nervous.

Thats what base64 etc is for. Text things get broken horribly to by
emailing, but at least for binary things you can use mime-parts to get
them through safely. The pack format assumes an 8-bit safe data channel,
writing a base64-streaming-decoder is quite easy, and I'd expect that to
crop up as part of this work.

Rob

-- 
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20070615/d8f3cc3a/attachment.pgp