Creating a branch other than master using bzr-git

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

John Arbash Meinel writes:

 > So there are a few forms. And I'd like us to consider that it would be
 > nice if an HTTP request could actually return the right thing for the
 > given request. Further, we have to consider what it would look like as a
 > local path.

Why does that matter?  I doubt that this notation will be used much
except to clone/checkout a branch.

 > 1) Fragment
 > http://host/repos#mybranch

 > Another problem with "#" is that it isn't really designed to allow the
 > HTTP server to yield a different page. I could be completely wrong,

According to the URI RFC, in *general* it's designed to refer to some
part of the the whole resource.  However, dumb HTTP servers are a good
thing.  Let's not mess them up.

 > 2) Query
 > http://host/repos/?branch=mybranch

[...]

 >   bzr log mybranch
 > 
 > Is just DWIM.

Which I just hate, so I won't comment further. ;-)

 > 3) Parameters
 > The URL spec allows you to use a ";" to specify parameters to each
 > portion of the path:

In fact in RFC 3986 it says that the the segments are opaque to a
generic URI parser, except for "." and ".." special segments which are
removed by the resolution process.  It mentions that ";key=value" is
often used to notate segment parameters, but that ",value" is not
uncommon either.  I think this is fragile, especially for dumb servers.

 > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme#Generic_syntax

Ouch.  Jon Postel is turning over in his grave....

 > One other possibility is to make more use of our "-d" flag, [...]
 > you would do:
 > 
 >   bzr log -d http://bazaar-vcs.org/bzr/bzr.dev NEWS
 > 
 > With the advantage that this scales up to multiple files without having
 > to repeat the long URL or use {} shell notation.

Yes, that's nice.