Nested tree support [was Bzr externals for bzr and bzr-svn]

[Patrick van der Velde]

Hi Guys

Thanks everybody for the answers to my questions. I can see that there
are many different view points on this subject and I understand both
sides of the story. Currently at work I'm blocked from using bzr
because it doesn't play well with SVN externals, however I am able to
use bzr quite well in my personal projects :)

Given that the lack of nested trees seems to be a blocker for quite a
few features (snv-externals integration, multi-level projects etc.)
can somebody shed some light on why there is no development on this
feature? Is the spec incomplete, is it blocked by other features, not
enough people to work on it .... etc. I think it would be nice to know
why nested trees isn't moving on.

Regards

Patrick

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 05:10, Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> wrote:
>> The only reason I raise it is that nested trees have remained in the
>> pipeline for several years now, and this is probably an adoption blocker
>> for many users who make use of Subversion externals. Having bzr co
>> svn_branch just work, even when there are externals, would be a major
>> bonus, and perhaps you'll be able to reuse most of the implementation
>> when you make it work with nested trees...
> The lack of nested trees is also a blocker for a lot of people who want
> to use Bazaar natively.
>
> Getting the bzr-externals support in bzr-svn mappings right is tricky
> and quite a bit harder than with nested trees because it uses a file
> in .bzrmeta, which causes complications when roundtripping.
>
> Furthermore, it's not just bzr-svn that would have to get support for
> bzr-externals and then later converted over to nested trees - there's
> also bzr-git (submodules) and bzr-hg (subrepos).
>
> To reiterate, these are my personal reasons for not working on a
> bzr-externals mapping for bzr-svn, I don't think it's necessarily a bad
> idea. If anybody else is interested in working on this, I'm happy to
> answer questions they may have.
>