[RFC] An explicit "this branch has moved" format

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Right now, Bazaar lets you use an HTTP redirect or a lightweight checkout to
redirect people to a different location. I've used the lightweight checkout
trick a few times when I move something on my local system to being officially
hosted on launchpad.

Generally, I do it with bzr checkout --lightweight, rm *, rm -rf .bzr/checkout,
which is a bit clumsy at the least. Also, I often end up editing the
.bzr/branch/location file, just in case. (if I do bzr co lp:/// it writes
bzr+ssh://jameinel@ to the location file, and I want it to have just lp:///).

Even more, though, the user never knows that the official location has moved.
'bzr info' will show them the new location, but the branch/checkout/update/pull
commands would not.

If you use an http redirect, the user does get a message about "http://path is
redirected to http://other/path", but it is a bit harder to configure an http
redirect (and certainly outside the scope of bzr).

So I was thinking about adding an explicit branch format, which when opened
would tell the user that "you can find the real branch over here, I'll redirect
you". Otherwise it would work like our current BranchReference format. (the
format behind co --lightweight.)


And then we would add a command to create these. Maybe something like "bzr
create-redirect-branch". (bzr init --format=redirect-branch? Doesn't quite work
because you can't tell it the URL to redirect to.)

Thoughts?

John
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