.bzrrules in branch histories

[Robert Collins]

So Ian is making great progress towards having a robust tree filtering
facility which will allow keyword expansion, end-of-line translation and
so on. The .bzrrules support is part of that by activating translation.

I've expressed concerns in the past about having bzr metadata part of
the versioned tree - .bzrignore is an example of this, and its somewhat
problematic today.

Currently .bzrrules will be happily versioned by bzr 1.6; I'd like to
disable that - to have the rules support include .bzrrules in the list
of control directory names (like .bzrshelf) so that it does not get
versioned.

This would do several things:
 - it would stop .bzrrules propogating 
 - it would also prevent .bzrrules propogating into svn (see bug 145155)
 - prevent a bunch of small fallout like export having to change

I think that this is fine: rules and tree filtering are a new feature;
they are not baked yet, and I think its more important with a new
feature to be conservative about the impact on the versioned-history
than to roll out every aspect of it straight-up.

People do want to share their tree filtering configurations, and doing
this would mean they can't by default today; I'd be delighted to help
get a solid sharing mechanism in place over the next release or two.

There seem to be conflicting requirements for tree filtering sharing
though, which is why I'm not concerned about pushing back and aiming to
get it smooth for the 'its supported by default' moment.

Concretely people need to setup the right rules to mark some files as
binary and some as text; they may also want to be able to see what rules
were set in the past; finally they may want to use the *latest* rules on
all versions of their tree(because .png is binary even in a tree from
last year which does not have a rules file setup for it)

So in short:
 - exclude .bzrrules from being added or versioned today
 - talk through the needs for .bzrrules sharing and version during 1.7
 - have a solid answer in place for 1.8

What do you all think?
-Rob

-- 
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
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