Some feedback on colo plugin

[Óscar Fuentes]

Stefan Monnier <monnier at iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

[snip]

> This said, there are other use cases where a different kind of behavior
> would be useful, especially regarding pull: I'd like to be able to say
> "bzr colo-pull" and have each of the branches updated, which means that
> the branches will be pulled from their respective upstream branches if
> any.

This can be accomplished today. There is the `multi-pull' plugin if you
are interested on just pulling, and the `mirror' plugin, which on
addition will clone any branch missing on your local machine. `mirror'
works with `colo', at least on the simple experiments I did. If
`multi-pull' does not work with `colo', it shouldn't be too hard to
fix. After all, `colo' just uses a bzr shared repository that can be
operated as the one the user explicitly creates.

BTW, on the past I reported that `mirror' was broken. I was wrong. You
need to create a file named `mirror' on the .bzr directory containing
the URL of the remote repository you want to clone. It doesn't work with
the `bzr' protocol, though.

> Also I'd like to be able to say "bzr colo-merge" which would merge
> branches according to some description of relations between them (like
> Git's "tracking" status).

This looks difficult to do automagically. Maybe an interactive process,
where `colo-merge' switches to each colocated branch, merges and stops
if conflicts are found. But an implicit merge goes against bzr's policy.

This sort of `colo-merge' and the pull/push/mirror funcionality can be
implemented with scripts.

It is like we could add all sorts of "porcelain" over Bazaar's
"plumbing" (sorry!)

[snip]