Are svn properties in bzr-svn important?

[Aaron Bentley]

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Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
Seeing
>> that huge digest with each changeset is getting annoying, so I'd like
>> to delete them, but I want to make sure it won't mess up bzr-svn at
>> all.

Bazaar is a distributed system, and so its revisions are write-once
data.  We need to be sure that a revision name means exactly the same
thing to everyone who uses it.  So in Bazaar, revision properties cannot
be edited.  Editing the svn property would violate referential integrity.

Ideally, these properties would be terse.  I'll address that below.

Failing that, you could reconfigure trac to hide these properties.

Finally, if you are sure that there are no references to these revisions
anywhere else, you could actually delete the properties.  I would not
recommend this option.

> What are the properties used for? 
> They're used for merge tracking. The ancestry information for the remote
> branch will become incomplete (get_ancestry()). My guess is that this
> has consequences for the quality of merge, but perhaps others can
> comment on that better.

Yes, this would reduce the number of merge candidates, causing merge to
fail, or to produce poorer results.  (Such as silently resolving
conflicts in favour of someone else's changes.)

But the corresponding attributes in Bazaar are not nearly this verbose.
 Why do we need such long properties for this?  Can't we just list the
parents of this revision, and derive the rest?  In fact, we shouldn't
usually need to list the lefthand parent, either.

Aaron
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