RFC: advisory "branch_status" flag in branch.conf

[Eric Siegerman]

On Fri, 2011-05-06 at 15:07 +0200, Martin Pool wrote:
> That is a fair point. If the intention is just to let users hide
branches,
> perhaps the semantic should just be "hide". On the other hand people
may want
> to categorize them into under review, abandoned, etc. Perhaps it would
be
> hard to have hardcoded behavior for those categories.

A combination might work well.  A config item that declares the
branch's status would fit well in core's namespace, e.g. under
bzr.branch, as has been suggested.

(If this item is indeed going to contain values like
"experimental", "review", "merged", a more accurate name for it
than "status" would be "bzr.branch.lifecycle_stage" or similar.
Besides, as Vincent noted, "status" -- as a word and concept, if
not specifically as a config setting -- is horribly overloaded.)

A separate config item that tells bzr-colo the rules for which
branches to display -- e.g. "show me branches in states
(experimental, development, review) but not in (merged,
abandoned)" -- would properly belong under the plugin.colo
namespace.

If the latter some day proved generally useful enough to pull
into core's namespace (e.g. for use by qbzr/explorer and other
plugins), it would belong under "bzr.ui" or some such, not under
"bzr.branch".

Model vs. view, more or less...

  - Eric