Shallow branches question

[Nicholas Allen]

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| 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.
But when you branch from another branch that does not have all  the 
revisions yet Bazaar could remember the location where that branch needs 
to get remaining revisions from (and if that is chained then 
recursively). It then has multiple locations it can try to retrieve the 
missing revisions that are not cached locally. So if Martin's branch 
went offline then Bazaar could load the revisions from your branch, and 
if your branch is offline then from my branch etc.

The branch would still be mostly functional without all revisions anyway 
so this wouldn't be such a big problem. I think making retrieval of the 
revisions a background process while allowing users to commit 
immediately should be the default. You could have an option to retrieve 
all revisions first but I don't think it should be the default behavior. 
There is only one problem with DVCS that does not exist for centralised 
VCS: That is the time to branch is proportional to the size of the 
history. If Bazaar can eliminate this by default it would be simply awesome!

It would be nice if this daemon process could embed itself in the system 
tray too. You would see progress bars for how much history is still to 
be retrieved for all you branches. You could always wait until all 
history is there before publishing your branch too - so the chaining 
issue would be no problem in that case. But at least you could start 
work right away.

Cheers,

Nick
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