RFC: advisory "branch_status" flag in branch.conf

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Wed, 2011-05-04 at 15:15 -0500, Neil Martinsen-Burrell wrote:
> In bzr-colo, there has been a request to provide a way to hide
> branches in a colocated workspace from being listed:
> http://pad.lv/767332.  I've implemented this in a roundabout manner by
> hiding (by default) branches whose names start with "."  Martin
> pointed out that renaming branches is not an ideal way to deal with
> this problem, since it can break links to other branches and
> checkouts.
> 
> As a better way of handling this, I am proposing an option in
> branch.conf called "branch_status" with possible values including at
> least "active" and "inactive".  bzr-colo could then use this flag to
> hide branches marked with "branch_status = inactive".  The reason that
> I bring this up on list is that I wonder if such an option could be
> used profitably by other parts of the Bazaar ecosystem (qbzr,
> bzr-explorer, etc.)  Interested parties could add other values of the
> option for their own purposes.  Also, this option would occupy the
> default branch.conf namespace and so the option name "branch_status"
> couldn't be used by anyone else.
> 
> Now that Vincent's "bzr config" command has landed, it is very easy to
> manipulate the contents of branch.conf, so marking a branch as
> inactive is as simple as doing "bzr config branch_status=inactive" and
> eliminating all mention of the option can be done with "bzr config
> --remove branch_status".
> 
> Is there any interest out there for standardizing on the option
> "branch_status" as a way of marking the state of a branch?
That might be useful. There also seems to be a bit of overlap with the
branch status setting that's used on Launchpad, perhaps it would make
sense to support similar values (Merged, Abandoned, Development,
Experimental, Mature).

Cheers,

Jelmer
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