RFC: supporting code review and partial commits better

[Scott Scriven]

* Ian Clatworthy <ian.clatworthy at canonical.com> wrote:
> I honestly can't see DVCS tools replacing CVS & Subversion at 
> many projects until 'give me a filtered branch/checkout' is 
> available. Tech writers and translators just want to see their 
> 1% of mega-projects, not all the code and other stuff. Having 
> this for the OOo, GNOMEs and KDEs of the world will win plenty 
> of friends.

KDE's mega-repository is frightening.

> Here's a sketch of how I wanted 'filtered views' to work ...
> 
>   $bzr branch http://bzr.example.com/proj --view docs
>   Branched 1234 revisions.
>   Ignoring files outside view: docs/

For the people who really want only part of a branch, is it at 
all feasible to do something like a lightweight partial checkout?

  $bzr checkout --lightweight http://bzr.example.com/proj --subdir foo/bar/docs
  Updated to revision 1234.

This would create ./docs/, with metadata in ./docs/.bzr/ .

Or, perhaps the user should pull a treeless branch and make their 
partial checkouts tied to the local branch instead of the remote 
one.  That way, at least 'diff' and 'status' could run without 
network access.  But in any case, this seems like it wouldn't be 
much harder to add than filtered views.

The only reasons I ever use svn any more are partial checkouts 
and svn:externals.  This would eliminate one of those reasons.


-- Scott