Looms compatible default format?

[Martin Pool]

2009/5/1 Aaron Bentley <aaron at aaronbentley.com>:
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> Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
>> Looms currently require a custom branch format that's provided by the
>> looms plugin. This makes it impossible to open loom branches unless you
>> have the looms plugin.
>>
>> How much code would be required to support the required methods for
>> looms on the new branch format implementation? If it's a small amount of
>> code, would this be useful? Has this perhaps already been considered in
>> the past?

I'm not sure if you mean "open looms in a fallback way without the
plugin" or "move the format-level support into the core, but maybe not
the UI."

The first of them seems equivalent to changing the loom plugin to not
use a special format but to just store extra info that will be ignored
if the plugin is not present.  That could be done only in the plugin,
it seems to me.  That kind of connects to the larger discussion about
whether bzr's pattern of refusing to do anything with data it doesn't
fully understand is really optimal.

The second of them sounds more attractive to me, and I think we should
tackle it as part of the larger review of what the user model for
repositories, trees and branches should really be.  I think if we have
a concept of multiple named branches within a single .bzr directory
then looms would build on top of that fairly straightforwardly and
cleanly, and then they could either be a policy layer in a plugin or
built in.

However, I don't want to put that discussion on the front burner until
more of the current work is finished, and then maybe talk around the
time of UDS.  As Robert said on irc

> concretely, I think we should finish bbc; get commit fully fixed for it (someone needs to do iter_changes), get networking fully done (spiv and I are halfway through the delta representation, jelmer is reporting memory issues,...)

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>