Some plans for scmproj

[Michael Gliwinski]

Hi Alexander,

On Wednesday 25 November 2009 15:49:40 Alexander Belchenko wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to share some of my plans regarding nearest future of scmproj
> plugin development. As many others I've expected to see nested trees
> support to materialize in bzr itself, but it's still not here, so I have
> to continue improve my plugin.

Thank you for doing so.  I think the plugin can be useful regardless if nested 
trees support is added to bzr.

[snip history and externals ref]

> So, to unblock further development I decided to remove several features:
> alts (though they are very useful), subsets (never proved to be very
> useful) and move project.cfg from separate branch that lived in .scmproj
> directory to in-tree config, using the latest approved way with .bzrmeta
> (thanks, Ian). The latter means that I also will remove support for
> boxed workspaces which is far from ideal (because of limitations of
> lightweight checkouts) anyway.
>
> Removing alts is critical point, because right now it blocks snapshots
> implementation. Also it will simplify some other things. And also
> unblocks desire to have several project configs with different number of
> components (subsets does not help us here, unfortunately).

That (ability to have project config with different number of components) 
would be really awesome.  I was just looking for something like that :)

However, do you have any plans to reimplement alt/variant like functionality 
on top of the new architecture?  I must say at the moment I rely on them 
heavily.

> Subprojects will be implemented very soon but in limited fashion
> (without variants supports, because we deprecate alts).
>
> Decision to move project config to .bzrmeta is hard, but it seems my
> initial plans for separate .scmproj control branch have not used in full
> potential, so looking at bzr-externals success I'd like to not continue
> this path.
>
> Also, I'm planning to release latest code from trunk as 0.4.6 and then
> in several steps going to new design as listed above. It will be major
> design, UI and API break, but I hope it will make scmproj much better.
>
> If you're using my plugin and my planned changes will affect you --
> please speak. I can put the latest verison into maintain mode for some
> time.
>
> If you want to share your ideas, I'll be interested to hear them, but in
> general the listed approach looks very promising.
>
> A.

I actually see the scmproj plugin as something more than externals/nested 
trees support.  In fact I was looking into a possibility of adding 
project/component resources, for example my current use case is creating 
additional files, hardlinks, softlinks, etc. when the project is checked 
out/updated, etc.

I'm interested in how the architecture will evolve, I'm sure the changes are 
for the better so keep up the good work!

I will follow up next week, am a bit short on time today :)

Thanks


-- 
Michael Gliwinski
Henderson Group Information Services
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Phone: 028 9034 3319

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