[RFC] New name for 'repositories' - 'baskets'

[Jan Hudec]

On Fri, Mar 03, 2006 at 01:23:09 +0100, David Allouche wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-03-01 at 09:42 +0100, Erik Bågfors wrote:
> > A repository is a "place/thing/whatever" that stores your revision
> > data. There are two kinds of repositories in bzr.
> > 
> > A shared repository can contain multiple branches, this is the kind of
> > repository that you find in for example subversion.
> > 
> > A "none shared/internal/branch specific/private/whatever" repository
> > is contained in a stand alone branch and is automatically created
> > whenever you create a stand alone branch.  This type of repository can
> > not contain multiple branches
> > -------
> > 
> > Is there anything not clear about that description?
> > 
> > I think we just need to find a clear name for "shared" and "none shared".
> 
> On the off chance that adding one more message might help:
> 
> Let's consider how we _spontaneously_ talk about the various objects,
> because that's what the users will be the most exposed to, through IRC
> chats, mailing list discussions, blogs, and casual wiki pages (that is
> not the carefully-crafted-not-to-confuse-newbies documentation pages).
> 
> I say "a checkout" to mean a bare checkout, regardless of where its
> history is stored.
> 
> I say "a branch" to mean either "a branch using a shared-repository", or
> "a standalone branch", or even "a standalone checkout".
> 
> I say "a repository" to mean "a shared-repository".
> 
> When I speak about the repository in a self contained branch or checkout
> I expect I would just to say "branch".
> 
> The fact that there is indeed a repository inside a standalone branch
> appears to me like an implementation detail that's not really relevant
> to the user experience. It might be a bit difficult to grasp for people
> not used to darcs/monotone/git/mercurial and not really interested in
> the inner workings of bzr, but I think those are also the people who
> neither need nor want to know about it.

Yes, repository inside a standalone branch is an implementation detail.

Unfortunately users do have some associations with the word 'repository',
which will lead some of them to think there is a 'repository'(random-user) in
a stand-alone branch and others to think there is not.

> The only gotcha there, is that technical discussions mentioning
> repositories (the implementation detail, that is also present in
> standalone branches) might be a bit confusing to the innocent bystander.
> I find it acceptable since the only alternative seems to be exposing new
> users to a seemingly gratuitous new term.

It never does any good if the same term is used with two meanings in the same
context:

You create standalone branch by 'bzr branch' command.
Branches store revision data in repositories.
Repository is created with 'bzr make-repository'.
So do I need to do 'bzr make-repository' to create a stand-alone branch?

> PS: I hope that bzr will allow me to abuse standalone branches to let me
> tie branches-without-repo to them. It could be handy and it would be a
> nice way to expose the orthogonal nature of the various concepts.

Which however means that the repository of a stand-alone branch becomes
user-visible and therefore requires user-level name!

-- 
						 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec <bulb at ucw.cz>
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