Re: Making the tarball with bzr data

[Óscar Fuentes]

Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:

> Why do I have to copy the files? Why can't this setup be done with the
> already existing files?

You can do this, but it practice, it can cause a bit of confussion if
the files you already have correspond to a different revision than the
tip of the bzr branch you download. How would bzr know that those files
are not edited but instead belongs to a past revision?

> I have put my little elisp library nXhtml at Launchpad so you can
> download it with bzr. However a lot of people already have nXhtml
> installed, but it was not checked out from Launchpad. It came from a
> zip file or similar.
>
> Now I believed that since bzr is a new modern system it would of
> course have thought of that kind of situation. I am a bad manual
> reader so I had probably just not understod how to do it... - it is of
> course possible to update the files using only bzr. That was my
> believe.

First: if all your users had the very same version of your library, you
could distribute a tarballed .bzr/ directory with the necessary
metadata. Expecting this is unrealistic, though.

Second: the amount of traffic you save by re-using the source code on
the target machine is nil: when the user downloads the metadata, he gets
a compressed history of the source code. You could use a lightweight
checkout, and this would be a very short download indeed, but then the
user would be very constrained on their Bazaar usage, as almost all
interesting features of Bazaar are not usable when everything you have
at your disposal is a lightweight branch, apart from risking on the
problem mentioned above.

Third: if you are thinking about Bazaar as a system for distributing
your software, I think that pointing potential users to a bzr branch for
obtaining a copy of your library you are raising the entry barrier quite
a bit, unless your intended audience already knows Bazaar.

> Maybe my believe is crazy. Maybe this should not be possible for some
> reason. But I do not understand why.

It is possible. It is not worthwhile.

[snip]

-- 
Óscar