thread names in urls (Re: Creating a branch other than master using bzr-git)

[John Arbash Meinel]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Martin Pool writes:
> 
>  > I was thinking about perhaps ".../branch/+thread".  "+" has the
>  > advantage of being visually a metacharacter, but not one that has a
>  > strong meaning in either the unix or windows shell, or in http.
> 
> You crack me up!  I have a private convention (with git, where
> branches generally are "local") of doing builds in subdirectories, and
> I distinguish the build directories for different branches by
> prefixing "+" to the branch name.  I have "+*" in my user gitignore,
> of course.

> 
> I'm not complaining or suggesting that *my* usage is a reason not to
> use "+", but I wonder how many other people have hit on that
> convention (I bet a lot of Arch-ers and ex-Arch-ers use it, for
> example).

I adopted the "," prefix from Arch, but not the "+". "+" never made much
sense to me, especially because Arch itself was not consistent in using
it (IIRC).

> 
>  > It's used by convention as a short escape for space characters in
>  > filenames, but if I recall correctly (and we should check) this is
>  > not mandated or assumed, just a convention that servers use in
>  > mapping urls to the filesystem.
> 
> Actually, that would be the worse case because people using multiple
> servers might find the rules changing on them from location to
> location.  I also suspect that that convention would be implemented on
> the browser side rather than the server side.
> 
> Firefox 3 doesn't seem to implement it.
> 
> 

Well, we could just use a beginning space to mean the same thing... That
is probably even less common. Not many people name their files:
  " foo.txt".

Actually, I know that trailing whitespace is automatically stripped on
Win32, as we had some tests for it that failed :), but prefixed
whitespace works fine.

So you could then use:

http://host/branch/ thread
or
http://host/branch/+thread

To mean the same thing.

I will say that Launchpad likes to use + all over the place for pages.
Like "+editsshkeys", "+bug" etc. I'm not really sure how they chose when
to use a + character versus not. Perhaps it pre-dates the use of
different domains for bugs/code/etc. So it was a way to distinguish:

project/bug
from
project/+bug

Where the former is a branch named "bug" and the latter is a bug page.

John
=:->
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Cygwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAkk1WtUACgkQJdeBCYSNAAPLXQCg0o6/pJXAYIAWrUoXLRun9WnI
C7sAni3VSUVNVjj+eQsTqILQgw2MtoaV
=QU3d
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----