bzr-svn / qbzr issue with qlog

[John Arbash Meinel]

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...
>> So... how does one give priority for branch A versus branch B? We could
>> arbitrarily look for branch names like "trunk", but otherwise we just
>> have a DAG with branch tips at certain points. There is no clear
>> superiority between one branch and another.
> 
> Aha, but there is a connection to Subversion, which does prioritize.
> The totality of information in the shared repository must have the
> metadata or bzr-svn wouldn't be able to work.

Not really. Subversion is just a versioned filesystem and there are some
conventions about how you should but stuff into there. But I can
guarantee that a lot of Subversion repositories are a mess.

For starters, there is no clear preference between:

$repo/trunk/project
or
$repo/project/trunk

Going further, I've seen pretty much *everything* just end up under
"trunk" because that is where people were told to commit.

>
> Also there is a priority imposed because a branch is taken of another
> branch so the one that is the parent should take priority.  This
> information must be in the branches and so could be used.

...

How can you tell whether branch A came from B or B came from A? I
realize you probably ran "bzr branch A B" at some point. At the moment,
we don't record that event, so all we know is that you have 2 branches,
that share some history, and have some new data in the tip.

>> Anyway, using the name "trunk" as a hint that this should be the first
>> branch to be evaluated would probably be reasonable, but I certainly
>> wouldn't say that it would always work.
> 
> For DVCS in general I think using special labelling such as this is a
> bad move.  It is fine for Subversion but not really for Bazaar or
> Mercurial.  Git does give a special place to the branch "master".
> 
>> What if you give the branches directly, instead of having them found. So
>> if you did:
>>
>> bzr qlog trunk my_branch
>>
>> rather than
>> bzr qlog
> 
> That does seem to do interesting things.  So perhaps there needs to be a
> way of enforcing the structure for the qlog rendering.  Even if the DVCS
> does not or cannot know it, the human being know the information.
> 

Right. So you could label branches. You could create an arbitrary
"priority" number, and every time someone ran "bzr branch" it would bump
that number by 1. Might be interesting, though I'm not sure it is
interesting enough to write the support for it.

John
=:->
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