Feedback from evaluation in a corporate environment

[Ian Clatworthy]

Uri Moszkowicz wrote:
> The problem
> is really that there is no middle ground between tree and treeless - you
> either have to decompress it all or none of it and with 10GB - 100GB
> those are still long and disk space eating operations. What Bazaar
> needs, I think, is the ability to create a partial tree branch.
> Something like:
> 
> bzr branch --stacked --expand software --expand tests/test1 ../trunk

As Martin mentioned in his reply, "filtered views" were designed with
this in mind. The intention was that users or teams could define views
in a file like:

  software
  tests/tests1

and then only unpack those items like this ...

  bzr branch --view-from XXX source destination

where XXX is a reference (URL say) to the file above. In other words,
it's a little like CVS modules but more flexible in that individual
users could define whatever subsets they cared about (rather than it
only being done centrally). Centrally defined views, if any, could live
in .bzrmeta/views say.

See
http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/bzr.dev/en/user-reference/view-help.html
for the currently available functionality and
http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/FilteredViews for the design notes on
extending the feature further.

> It would be nice if there were some way to discover the existing binding
> rather than looking at the branch.conf file by the way. Something like:
> bzr branch -show. Maybe it's elsewhere and I missed it.

bzr info -v

> What do you all think about these proposals?

Very interesting. I'm really keen to see some further development in
this area because, like you, I believe many corporate projects *require*
this sort of partial tree functionality. I don't have time to work on it
though and are unlikely to any time soon. I'm very happy to mentor a
community developer though keen to make it happen!

Ian C.