darcs foreign branch support ?

[Ian Clatworthy]

Simon Michael wrote:
> Is there anyone working on this ? I'd be interested in helping, if so.

Not to my knowledge.

> I see this as useful in itself and also a step towards add darcs repo
> import support to launchpad.

Talking to foreign branches in-situ is really cool, particularly for
interoperability on small-to-medium sized projects that are locked into
another tool because of process/tool integration support. For larger
projects, dynamic interoperability like this tends to be slower than
working from a migrated mirror that is incrementally refreshed to keep it
in sync with the master foreign branch.

I see launchpad import support as a different problem to foreign branch
support. If and when we can get the various front-ends to fastimport
(http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrFastImport/FrontEnd) robust and reliable, I'd
hope we could extend LPs import facility to include many more VCS tools -
git, hg, darcs, p4 etc. I don't work on the LP team so I can't say that
will happen. I do know however that there are certainly advantages into
going that direction, e.g. supporting one common importer and N exporters
is easier than supporting N point-to-point tools IMO.

Ian C.