.bzrignore -> .bzrmeta/ignore

[Robert Collins]

On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 07:35 +1000, Ian Clatworthy wrote:

> >> This is what the “Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY)” principle is designed to
> >> avoid <URL:http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DontRepeatYourself>.
> 
> +1 on applying DRY here.
> 
> > Amen to that. Would it be so terrible to keep .bzrignore as a legacy
> > special case forever (and never implement .bzrmeta/ignore)?
> 
> I think moving towards a consistent design is the best idea, though
> timing is tricky. I'd like to see Bazaar 2.1 and later support
> .bzrmeta/ignore *or* .bzrignore, i.e. 'bzr add' and 'bzr check' should
> complain if both are found.

Consistency is nice, confusing users isn't. One can argue that we're
still below the big hump of the adoption curve (as indeed git and svn
still are), so most of our users are yet to come, and having every meta
file be in .bzrmeta would be better for them.

OTOH, we can guarantee confusion during a migration of this sort, and I
think clear docs trump the minor inconsistency of having .bzrignore
remain and not having a .bzrmeta/ignore.

What benefits do we get by moving an established file into .bzrmeta ?

Does any of our code become simpler? Will we get less bug reports? Will
our functionality improve?

> Practically, teams/communities tend to recommend a minimum version of
> tools and only rely on new features once those minimum versions change.
> Once a project says "bzr 2.1.0 is the minimum", then they can safely
> rename .bzrignore to .bzrmeta/ignore and all should be well.

So, in several years time we can expect > 1/2 the projects adopting bzr
*at that time* to make that statement. And in the mean time we'll be
dealing with however much fallout there is from repeating ourselves in
the interim.

Inkscape, which just moved to bzr, mandates bzr 1.3.1 as their minimum
version.

-Rob
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