Recipes vs. Looms

[James Westby]

On Mon Dec 14 23:50:00 +0000 2009 Barry Warsaw wrote:
> >Looms on the other hand currently have no parent pointers
> >per-thread. This makes it impossible to do a full update
> >without extra information. At the least we need to be able
> >to pull in the upstream changes to the bottom thread for
> >daily builds, but recipes allow you to pull in changes to
> >all the other threads at the same time.
> 
> I don't fully understand, but when I've done Launchpad branches using threads,
> the bottom thread always points to my local copy of trunk.  Thus, if I update
> my (outside-the-loom) trunk branch, then down-thread to the bottom, bzr pull,
> then bzr up-thread (I think --auto is the default), I'll have merged in the
> new trunk to all my threads.

Currently looms conflate the pull location for the whole loom (if you
were collaborating with multiple people on the same loom and wanted to
update) with the pull location for the bottom thread (if you want
to pull in the latest code.)

In addition there is no way to specify locations for other threads,
so you could e.g. pull the upstream thread, up thread and then merge
a branch of that upstream, then up-thread to work on your modifications
on top of the combination.

This has two problems:

  * Ubuntu developers have to remember locations of everything so they
    can type them in to e.g. pull upstream, or we add new infrastructure
    on top to remember for them.
  * The pulls can't be automated for daily builds, unless we again add
    new infrastructure on top.

Thanks,

James