Foreign branch infrastructure plans

[Jelmer Vernooij]

Hi Ian,

On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 11:58:08AM +1000, Ian Clatworthy wrote:
> Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> > So, over the past year or so I've slowly been providing patches
> > to improve the infrastructure of Bazaar to support foreign branches. 

> > I thought I would give an update as to what (little) there is
> > left to do:

> Thanks for sending this to this list. I'm yet to digest what you've
> done, let alone what's remaining, but I want to make some quick
> comments for you to think about. Apologies if those comments appear
> dumb - I certainly haven't thought them though in any real depth yet!

> >  * Integrate "bzr dpush" so it can be used by other foreign branch
> >    plugins. This patch is currently waiting for review.
> Can we use a more meaningful name than dpush? dpush is fine as an
> alias but it isn't very discoverable unless you know that it's the
> command you want.
Yeah, I agree dpush isn't the clearest of names. Unfortunately I can't
really think of anything better atm. Suggestions are welcome :-)

> >  * Bzr info needs to be extendable so foreign formats can show extra
> >    information. E.g. "bzr info" on a svn repository should show the
> >    repository's UUID.
> I'd also like to see us make more of an effort not to lose/hide
> semantic data available in foreign systems. In particular, I'd like
> us to retain/display file copies in our data formats, even if we
> don't have the UI for defining copies yet. I've updated
> http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrFileCopies in recent days with an outline
> of potential schema changes supporting this (together with some
> thoughts on how to resolve some of the UI interaction issues).
Good point, this would be very nice to have. Even if we couldn't use
the actual semantic data yet inside of e.g. "bzr merge", it would be 
nice if we could at least store it so that it isn't lost. 

I'll split out your comments about fast-import / foreign branches into
a separate thread.

Cheers,

Jelmer
-- 
Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> - http://jelmer.vernstok.nl/