New user with a few questions.

[Raindog]

Thanks for the help, Matt, I think I'll get everything working in a 
desirable fashion by the end of the night.

You mentioned that you can only branch a full branch atm, is it in the 
pipeline to support branching subdirs or even files in the future?

Secondly, sftp seems to be exceedingly slow. I'd like to try to use hpss 
but I am unable to find any detailed documentation on exactly what needs 
to be done to get it working. I run windows, so if I want constant 
access I believe I should set it up as a service. Is 'bzr serve' the 
smart server?

Thanks.

Matt Nordhoff wrote:
> Raindog wrote:
>   
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am trying to configure the optimal repository layout for my projects
>> and am running into some problems.
>>
>> I want to have the following structure:
>>
>> MainRepo (init-repo)
>> |    +projects (?)
>> |    |    +proj1 (init?)
>> |    |    |   trunk
>> |    |    |   branches
>> |    |    +proj2
>> |    |    +projgroup1 (init-repo)
>> |    |    |    +trunk  (init)
>> |    |    |    |   proj1 (add to trunk)
>> |    |    |    |   proj2 (add to trunk)
>> |    |    |    +branches
>> |    |    |    |   ...
>> |    +thirdparty
>> |    |    some3rdpartylib
>> |    +resources
>> |    |   randomstuff
>>
>>
>> Currently I have the following issues:
>> 1. When I want to branch in the general term, the docs say to "copy" my
>> directory to another location and that that is a new branch. It seems to
>> me then that that branch has lost it's relationship to its original/parent.
>>
>>    Ex. copy projects\projgroup1\trunk\
>> projects\projgroup1\branches\somebranch
>>
>> It appears to be that that operation drops the information about the
>> branch/copy operation.
>>     
>
> If the docs say to use cp instead of "bzr branch", that's not right.
>
>   
>> 2. Similar to the 1st one, if I use bzr branch command, I find I have
>> some rather unpleasant limitations. The 1st limitation is that I can no
>> longer directly branch projects\projgroup1\trunk\proj1, I have to branch
>> projects\projgroup1\trunk. If I want to be able to branch the projects
>> in projgroup1\trunk, I have to init each directory and then I have to
>> manually push/pull/update/checkout each project which is undesireable
>> for users.
>>     
>
> Yeah, you can only branch a full branch at the moment, not a
> subdirectory of it.
>
>   
>> 3. repositories don't seem to actually have any benefit because users
>> have to check out each item in the repo individually, they can't just
>> check out the main repo, when they do, they literally get nothing but a
>> .bzr folder.
>>
>>
>> My goal is to have a central server, and have been following chapter 5
>> of the Bazaar User Guide. The problem is that the guide doesn't mention
>> how one would actually go about creating anything but a repo (init-repo)
>> that contains a branch (init), but unless you specifically check out the
>> branch, if you just check out the repo, again, you get nothing. I can
>> also make the repo a branch and add files/revisions to it that way, but
>> any branches in the repo are again left out. I don't understand how this
>> is desirable or wanted behavior.
>>
>> Is it common or a best practice to make a repo, make the repo a branch
>> also, add a setup script for users to execute after their initial
>> checkout that essentially checks out the rest of the branches/repo's of
>> the repo?
>>     
>
> Shared repos (as created by init-repo) are simply a storage
> optimization, nothing more.
>
> If you aren't using a shared repo, and you do "bzr branch a b", b will
> get a second copy of all of a's history, which wastes disk space and
> time. If they were in a shared repo, the shared repo would hold all of
> the history, so there wouldn't be a second copy.
>
>   
>> My second question relates to user authentication. Does bzrserve support
>> any user authentication or do I need to configure authentication on the
>> protocol such as ssh, etc.
>>     
>
> You'd have to use SSH for authentication.
>
> Someone recently created a bzr_access script (see contrib/bzr_access in
> the source tree) which may help here.
>
>   
>> Thanks for your time!
>> Josh
>>     
>
> For the repo layout, I'd do:
>
> projects
> |    +proj1 (init-repo)
> |    |   trunk* (init)
> |    |   branch1 (init)
> |    |   branch2 (init)
> |    +proj2 (init-repo)
> |        ... (same as above)
> (I don't have an opinion on the thirdparty and resources parts)
>
> * I'd use "proj1" or "proj1-dev" or something instead of "trunk", so
> someone can branch it without having to rename the directory to
> something useful.
>
> Whether it would work well for you or not is another story...
>