scmproj and colo plugins, problem re colo-push/colo-pull

[Martin Pool]

On 11 February 2010 19:49, Alexander Belchenko <bialix at ukr.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm using colo plugin for most of my work, and now I've encountered the
> problem in the interaction between scmproj and colo. I would like to
> tell about this problem here, so developers of nested trees and
> colocated branches (if they will become a builtin feature) will be aware
> of it.
>
> Background: currently bzr keeps history of each branch separate
> (virtually separate in the case of shared repo), so when you push/pull a
> branch you only get the revisions which belongs to DAG formed by
> mainline history of the branch. So there is not possible to have some
> unnamed heads like in monotone or hg. This become a problem if I want to
> refer to a revision in colo workspace. If such revision is not in the
> current trunk then bzr will fail to operate in some circumstances. I can
> pull such revision and get correct branch if it present in colo
> workspace, but in most case I can't push it to the standalone branch. At
> least I'm not aware of this.

It seems to me what is really needed is an extensible way to say that
extra revisions or data is referenced by the branch.  Then we can make
sure to send it when the branch is pushed around.  I think the current
nested branches spec or code does this specifically for it's own
thing, but if it was made extensible it would allow many interesting
hacks.

I don't see this as particularly related to having unreferenced heads.
 bzr is happy enough to have them in the repository; the problem is
that they need to be seen at some level as actually being referenced,
though they're not referenced by the main revision graph.

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