Forbid uncommits over the network

Lasse Kliemann lasse-list-bazaar-2009 at mail.plastictree.net
Fri May 8 15:49:21 BST 2009


The uncommit feature makes me worried. I very much learned to 
appreciate Subversion's policy that revisions are immutable. This 
makes a central repository which is accessible only over the 
network a well-organized append-only storage and thus a superb 
backup infrastructure for many applications.

I read that uncommitted revisions in Bazaar are not lost; they 
can be restored by a pull when one knows their id. The uncommit 
command even prints that information after successful operation.  
However, in order to restore something, one has to know that it 
was lost in the first place. Yet commit logs do not show 
uncommits. There is a command 'bzr heads --dead-only' in 
Bzrtools, which could be used. However, one would have to use 
that regularly to check whether there happened any unwanted 
uncommits. Moreover, as I found out, on a branch or checkout that 
was created after the uncommit, even the 'heads' command does not 
show the uncommitted revision.

The easiest would perhaps be to add a '--disallow-uncommit' 
option, or such, to the Bazaar smart server.

I think that *local* uncommits are a nice feature. But it should 
be possible to configure a central repository in a way that a 
revision is immutable once pushed or committed to it. This might 
lead to a conflicting situation when a user locally uncommits 
beyond a revision that already has been sent to such a server. 
Maybe a warning could be displayed in such a case. 

What are your thoughts on this?
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