Shallow branches question

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Nicholas Allen wrote:
| Hi,
|
| I was wondering if it makes more sense to abstract away the concept of a
| shallow branch completely so the user does not need to know or care
| about it. My understanding is that a shallow branch allows one to branch
| without first downloading all the history so that you can get to work on
| a project quickly and commit etc. (this is really the only disadvantage
| of a DVCS compared to a central one). As far as  the user is concerned
| this is how it should be anyway. They just want to branch and get to
| work and not have to think "Should I create a shallow branch or a normal
| branch?". When I branch I would like Bazaar to immediately give me a
| working copy that I can commit to locally. The history of the branch can
| be downloaded in a background process behind the scenes. When you do an
| info Bazaar could tell you how much of the remote history you have.
| Advanced users could limit this by setting a horizon but I would imagine
| in 99% of the cases this would not be necessary.
|
| It seems like the idea of a shallow branch is to get around a limitation
| in the way Bazaar currently branches (by requiring all history first).
| This is an implementation issue that users shouldn't really care about.
| They just want to branch and whether it is a large project or a small
| one they want to get to work quickly.
|
| So if Bazaar's concept of how branches are created changed to fit with
| the way the user wants to work (i.e. as soon as possible after branching
| with ability to work offline) then there would be no need for a new
| concept called shallow branches.
|
| Or maybe I missed something...
|
| Cheers,
|
| Nick
|

One of the reasons to not do it automatically is because of chaining.
Specifically, if I have a shallow branch of you, and then Martin has one from
me, and Robert from him, it is easy for one of them to "disappear" temporarily
or even permanently.

I could see this even happening accidentally for a single user who spreads
things between their desktop, laptop, and server.

John
=:->
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