bzrlib and branch discovery

[Gabriel Filion]

On 07/08/10 01:07 PM, Maritza Mendez wrote:
> Since webservers parse requests to determine which "handler" to apply to a
> given request, it should be possible to provide a server-side script which
> parses a request for a named secondary location and returns plaintext  (or
> maybe the DTD of your choice) listing of that secondary location.  This is
> flexible enough to allow the server to do all sorts of security checks,
> which I would certainly insist upon it it were my server.
> 

ouch, this sounds more like a hack.. it covers only the servers that are
kind enough to add such a script.
listing subbranches should have been made easier for shared
repositories. for instance having a file contains a list of the
available branches that is maintained by the different operations on the
repository. it's redundant, but it's not such a big cost on performance
and it makes it possible to list branches over http.

> I'm afraid none of this helps you help yourself, unless you're running your
> own instance of LP.  Maybe the nice LP people will consider it for you.
> 

well, with all the answers people gave me, it sounds a bit too
complicated to achieve, so I gues I'll just drop my idea of
automatically discovering remote branches and I'll support only using
one branch at a time.


for the curious ones, the tool that I'm trying to build is a
remote-helper for git (e.g. a simple layer between git and something
that exports data from another repository that uses an unknown protocol
-- in my case I use bzr-fastimport) that lets it interact with bzr using
native remotes, much like bzr-git does, but from the git point of view.

being able to automatically discover branches would have meant that for
one remote, say a project on LP, there could be a bunch of branches
associated to it. but the use case can be covered by manually adding one
remote for each bzr branch.

-- 
Gabriel Filion