Browsing Bazaar

[Matt Nordhoff]

I can't help much with most of your post, but I'd like to respond to two
small things...

A. S. Budden wrote:

[snip]

> The main problem that I have had so far (apart from those discussed in
> the repository conversion thread) is regarding browsing a shared
> repository: I have a repository on a server that is being 'served'
> with "bzr serve --directory=/path/to/repo".  On the computer used for
> making modifications (we'll assume no security for simplicity), I want
> to checkout a project.  I can't remember where it is.  In subversion,
> I would do:
> 
> $ svn ls svn://servername/
> applications/
> development/
> documents/
> $ svn ls svn://servername/applications/
> firefox/
> vim/
> $ svn ls svn://servername/applications/vim/
> vimfiles/
> $ svn co svn://servername/applications/vim/vimfiles/
> 
> (In practice, I can probably remember a few bits).
> 
> On bazaar, I do:
> 
> $ bzr ls bzr://servername/
> bzr: ERROR: Not a branch: "bzr://servername/".
> 
> Bother.  I know it's not a branch, but how do I find the branches?!
> 
> $ bzr co bzr://servername/applications/vim/vimfiles/
> This still works!
> 
> Also, if I use "bzr ls" on bzr://servername/applications/vim/vimfiles,
> I get a (rather unmanageable) recursive file listing.  If I add the
> --non-recursive option, I get nothing at all.  I can get round this
> with something like:
> 
> bzr ls  bzr://localhost/applications/vim/vimfiles/  | grep
> 'bzr://localhost/applications/vim/vimfiles/[^/]*/\?$'
> 
> but surely this shouldn't be necessary?!  It also doesn't distinguish
> files and directories (no '/' on the end of directories).  I realise
> that it can be done with the apache server option or by connecting to
> the server with ssh/sftp and browsing the file system, but this seems
> a little indirect and it is strange that the server has an 'ls'
> command but doesn't really support browsing.  Am I missing something?
> 
> Many thanks in advance for any suggestions you might have.
> 
> Al

The bzrtools plugin adds a "bzr branches" command which does what you
want and can work on remote locations. However, it isn't fast, since the
client walks the file system one directory at a time over the Internet
(though the code is designed to make it easy to do it server-side in the
future).

Bazaar 1.11 added trailing slashes to directories in "bzr ls"'s output
(except when using --null, for the sake of backwards compatibility). :-D
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