"Co-located branches" by convention

[Martin Pool]

2009/12/1 John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com>:
> Martin Pool wrote:
>> 2009/12/1 Ian Clatworthy <ian.clatworthy at canonical.com>:
>>> Thoughts?
>>
>> I think it's an interesting way to experiment with it.  I'd certainly
>> hope that eventually this gets solved in some standard way across
>> Bazaar not in similar but adhoc ways across explorer, nested trees,
>> and whatever, but perhaps this is a good way to get there.
>>
>
> personally, I think the previous "shared tree" approach was much more
> powerful. Yes, I'm used to the model. But I frequently share branches
> between two "active" working trees.

So I guess it depends a bit on the scope of the feature or of this
conversation.  If Ian's finding this useful within explorer I don't
object to it, and perhaps experimenting with that is the best way
forward.

I think ideally we would get to a single setup that worked adequately
for everyone but that scaled from simpler to more advanced uses, to
avoid the confusion identified in the case of emacs (and others) that
people can recommend several different ways to use the tool - not
technically incompatible, but likely to confuse new users.

You could name a set of use cases for foreign branches, and perhaps
before deciding one approach is the best solution overall it ought to
be checked against that set

 * pushing/pulling multiple related branches from one place to another
 * having short names for other branches so they can be used for log, merge, etc
 * mapping foreign systems that support multiple sub-branches, primarily git
 * tracking the branches used by nested trees or by looms or pipelines
 * distinguishing mirrors of other upstream branches vs your own branches
 * ...

I think implementing this, at least in the first cut, by composing
BzrBranch objects is fine.  It would be good to at least get the api
abstracted eventually so that it could be handled by foreign control
directories, and so that it can migrate to something possibly smaller
than full BzrBranch directories eventually.

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