fast-import mirroring a foreign repository

[Ian Clatworthy]

Matt McClure wrote:
> Ian,
> 
> On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Ian
> Clatworthy<ian.clatworthy at canonical.com> wrote:
>> I do have plans for adding an --append
>> option to the fast-import command that treats the data as an incremental
>> data set but that's not yet done. If you'd like to have a go at adding
>> that, it should be pretty simple for someone like yourself.
> 
> I implemented --append in
> https://code.launchpad.net/~bzr-fastimport/+junk/fast-import-append .

Excellent. Thanks. I'll take a look in the next few days.

> I thought that I'd like to add some validation that appended imports
> are really incremental changes to already imported revisions.
> However, it's not obvious that the fast-import format requires that
> streams contain any information that could be used to guarantee a user
> is doing the right thing.  Thoughts?

It's a good question and one I don't have an answer to.

For someone mirroring an upstream branch or branches, I guess they just
want (1) the new revisions in the fast-import stream, together with (2)
some sort of cross-check that the local head/heads match the base used
to build the incremental fast-import stream?

VCS developers,

How are incremental imports handled across your current tools?

Ian C.