Pithy answer to "Why set a public branch?"

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Sun, 2009-02-22 at 11:10 +1100, Robert Collins wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-02-21 at 23:54 +0100, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> > On Sun, 2009-02-22 at 09:43 +1100, Robert Collins wrote:
> > > A public branch setting tells bzr where a branch is published. sending a
> > > bundle, making email notifications, lp-open - pretty much anything where
> > > you want to tell someone else where the branch is uses this.
> > > 
> > > If its not set explicitly, I think it defaults to the push_location, or
> > > perhaps it doesn't but should.
> > I don't think the push_location is a good default for the
> > public_location. The push_location is usually a bzr+ssh:// or sftp://
> > URL, and that's usually not available by the rest of the world. 
> I think it depends on the url.
> svn:// urls are usually world usable [perhaps requiring auth, but the
> same url], as are http://, and lp:. bzr+ssh://host/~/ urls are not world
> usable, nor are sftp://host/~/ urls. sftp://host/abspath *may be*.
> bzr://host/ probably are.
> 
> We can do a lot better than 'never' even if we can't get it right all
> the time.
I agree we should be doing a lot better than we are now :-) 
I don't think making public location default to push location will help
more than a few people though. In the rest of the cases it will just be
annoying to have this default. 

For example, I prefer pqm-submit telling me there's no public location
known than submitting some bzr+ssh:// URL and getting a failure email 5
minutes later.

AFAIK we always store the resolved URL for lp:, never the lp: URL
itself. I don't know anybody that uses svn:// for anything but anonymous
access - everybody seems to use svn+ssh:// for developer access, svn://
for anonymous (svn:// also didn't support secure auth until 1.5). 

That only leaves the following transports that can allow both anonymous
read and write access:
 * bzr smart server/webdav over http(s)
 * local
 * sftp://
 * ftp://
 * SVN over http(s)

Except for the last one, I don't think there are a lot of people using
one of these transports for both developer write access and anonymous
access.

Cheers,

Jelmer
-- 
Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> - http://samba.org/~jelmer/
Jabber: jelmer at jabber.fsfe.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 315 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20090222/0813cbf8/attachment.pgp