branch specific rules - the latest proposal

[Alexander Belchenko]

Ian Clatworthy пишет:
> I spoke to Martin yesterday about this and our proposal is to store
> branch specific rules in .bzrmeta/rules. This file will be versioned.
> 
> Some other important details:
> 
> * The .bzrmeta directory will be the recommended place for plugins
>   to store "in tree metadata".
> 
> * Content filters will not be applied to files in that directory.
> 
> * If conflicts exist in .bzrmeta/xxxxx after a merge, the base
>   content will be used. Otherwise, the in-tree content will be used.
> 
> There will undoubtedly be more devil in the detail but that's the
> direction we're thinking of currently.
> 
> We'll discuss this further today with interested parties (Robert, Aaron,
> John, etc.). If anyone on the list likes or dislikes the above, please
> speak up.

Some important for me questions:

* Does .bzrmeta will be final answer on the question: "will bzr support versioned properties"?
* How you suppose to fix chicken-eggs problem? E.g. on the phase of building/updating tree you need
access to .bzrmeta content but it is not hit the disk yet?
* If there is planned to provide some sort of builtin API to work with .bzrmeta content? Any CLI API
planned to set/change/delete config options/rules?
* For plugins like scmproj or bzr-externals there is need in having 2 forms of some config/rule:
canonical form which stored in repo and local form which can be used to override some settings
locally (e.g. if you have local mirror of heavy branch then you don't need to fetch it every time
from internet). Local form never should be committed to repo. Will you provide some
support/standardization on this?
* When I wrote .checkeol plugin and .bzrprop implementation there was raised question/suggestion
about versioning of the config control. Do you have any proposal on this? I saw several times
regrets re .bzrignore and absence of versioning for it.
* Do you plan to move .bzrignore into .bzrmeta?
* If I want to store metadata about verisoned files (binary flag for some files, encoding of content
for text files, etc) does there will be standard names/locations/rules? Does builtin algorithme will
use these rules, e.g. will diff use binary flag to avoid diffing multimegabytes non-text files? Is
it will be implemented on the level of CLI (builtins.py) or in core modules?

I'm personally not very keen to idea of .bzrmeta, but this is better than nothing at all.