[RFC] Caching in Stacked Branches

[Gary van der Merwe]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 8:10 PM, John Arbash Meinel
<john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
<Sniped in various places...>
> There is another use for stacked branches, which is the "get me the tip
> of a project so I can make a quick patch". As an example, to branch
> "python/trunk" takes about 200+ MB to download. By comparison, doing
> "bzr branch --stacked" only really needs to download about 21MB to get
> all of the working files.
>
> The downside, though, is that you download that 21MB, and then have to
> download it *again* whenever doing any more work. (Such as during,
> commit, diff, etc.)
>
> One fairly obvious possibility, would be to have Stacked branches cache
> any data that gets requested from a fallback.
>
> Any thoughts? It would be pretty slick if doing:
>
>  bzr branch --stacked $BIG_PROJECT work
>  cd work
>  < change stuff >
>  bzr diff
>  bzr commit -m "my local change"
>  bzr send
>
> Could download just the content for the working files, and then not have
> to download anything extra.

+1 - In fact - if we can get this working - I would advocate for this
to be the default.