Branching with a Central Repository

Eric Siegerman lists08-bzr at davor.org
Sat Oct 10 15:22:45 BST 2009


On Wed, 2009-10-07 at 14:01 +0100, Tom Widmer wrote:
> there could be specific URL prefixes you could use for various
relative 
> paths, such as:
> 
> ^ = repo root of branch this is a checkout of
> ~ = parent folder of branch this is a checkout of
> others? Obviously, the prefixes could be anything.

Interesting idea.  The prefixes should indeed be different,
though.  At one point in UNIX's history, "^" was a shell
meta-character -- a synonym for "|".  Bash doesn't treat it that
way, but some shells still might do.  Sure one can quote it, but
better not to impose that on people without good reason.

And "~" is so firmly established as "home directory" that, even
leaving aside the quoting issue, using it for anything else would
be most confusing.

How about alphabetic prefixes, as is done for revision specs?
E.g. "repo:" instead of "^".

Not sure what to use instead of "~" -- "parent:" is taken.  Even
if they're separate namespaces, I think it would be confusing to
have the same name in both, with different meanings.

For Windows compatibility, in this namespace one would have to
treat an unrecognized prefix as *not* being an error, but simply
the first part of an absolute pathname.  Let the kernel choke on
"rwpo:foo", rather than choking on it in bzr itself :-)

  - Eric





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