limit read-access in bzr

[Louis]

Hi guys,

Would you have any suggestions on how I could limit read-access in
bzr? Or if future version of bzr would enable read-access permissions?

For example, I have a few subdirectories in the repository that I want
to limit read-access (not just commit-access) to some developers. The
developers still have read & commit access to all other directories.

I was thinking about writing triggers to prevent the protected sub
directories from being created, but then the revision information for
the entire tree in in the .bzr directory. This means that it is easy
to reconstruct the protected source files from the revision
information.

I was also thinking of a combination of triggers and light-weight checkouts?

However, you would also get unnecessary conflicts when merging in
changes that modify the "missing" files. I'm also not sure how to
prevent bzr from automatically changing the "missing" files into
"removed" when committing.

The other option is to split the repository into multple repositories,
but that becomes a management nightmare, and you lose the ability to
'snapshot' the entire source tree easily.

Am I going about the wrong approach? What is a good way to continue
using .bzr, and read-protect certain subdirectories?

Could this ability be enabled by future changes of bzr? eg.
split-out-inventory, acl-transport, nested-tree-support?

Would it be useful to have the ability to make a modified-branch (not
just a clone) of another branch. You can "modify" a branch to filter
out sub-directories. It knows that the filter is not a "remove", so
merging changes from this modified-branch back to the parent doesn't
remove anything, and it's able to handle merges from the parent
gracefully.

Any other suggestions?

Regards,

Louis