Getting started with a content filter

[John Arbash Meinel]

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> 2.  Can't have entire history in all branches because it gets too
> big too fast on clients, need to store most of the large binary
> history on a server.  Is there a way to specify a partial history
> like this now?  Are stacked branches something that could help here?
> It'd have to be per-file, though, not global to the entire branch.
> In other words, I want all the code revisions local (or most of
> them), but only the past two large binary revisions, or whatever.
> The code would need to delete old history locally as new history is
> checked in (assuming it's been successfully pushed to the server, of
> course).

This one is tricky. And because of this requirement, I feel it should be
a specialized plugin/storage mechanism. There are lots of things like
lightweight checkouts/stacked branches etc that one could do. It just
feels like storing them out-of-band works best here.

> 
> 3.  Need some kind of locking protocol so two artists don't edit an 
> unmergable file at the same time.  I know this is heresy for dvcs,
> but it's going to have to get solved somehow if people are going to
> use bzr for these media projects that need the large binary files.  I
> think this isn't that big of a deal for this use-case, because #2 is
> going to require a server be accessible often anyway.  Not sure what
> to do when both artists are offline, but at least warning would be
> something.
> 
> Chris

There are 2 plugins I know of that provide some sort of cooperative
locking support for bzr. I had been working on one (about 50% complete,
IIRC), and someone else put one together. Though I can't find it now.

 lp:~jameinel/+junk/file_locking

I was happy with how mine was fleshing itself out. It basically writes a
file to a shared location that tracks what files are/aren't locked. It
tracked what *needed* to be locked by glob, IIRC.

In a distributed system, locking is going to be cooperative, but if the
tool support is reasonable, then I think it is fine to add. I still
don't quite understand *why* two people would be trying to edit the same
large-binary in incompatible ways. Although, maybe it is say editing the
beginning and ending of a video. Which is perfectly compatible, just bad
tool support for merging the changes together.

John
=:->
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