Bzr externals for bzr and bzr-svn

[Tom Widmer]

Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-04-12 at 13:31 +0100, Tom Widmer wrote:
>> Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
>>> Hi Patrick,
>>>
>>> On Mon, 2010-04-12 at 13:20 +1200, Patrick van der Velde wrote:
>>>> I've been experimenting with bzr at work. Creating a bzr 'working
>>>> directory' from our SVN repository is very simple and super quick!
>>>> However I haven't been able to make the svn-externals directories show
>>>> up in the bzr 'working directory'.
>>>>
>>>> I've installed bzr-externals (v1.3) but for some reason bzr-svn
>>>> doesn't import the externals directories from the svn repository. Is
>>>> there a way to make bzr-svn get the externals?
>>> There is nothing in Bazaar that bzr-svn could map externals to. Nested
>>> trees have been discussed, but it doesn't look like they will land any
>>> time soon and unfortunately this also means that svn externals won't be
>>> supported in bzr-svn any time soon.
>> As a short-medium term solution, would it be possible to use the 
>> bzr-externals plugin? Presumably you'd just have to populate the 
>> relevant .bzrmeta/ files during import, but perhaps this would cause 
>> backwards and forwards compatibility issues (and obviously you could 
>> only round-trip bzr externals that reference svn branches).
> That's not really an option - it would require changing the mapping
> format, and this affects all existing bzr-svn users. I don't want to do
> that for something that's only temporary. Furthermore, there are
> alternatives to bzr-externals and why would we pick bzr-externals rather
> than e.g. config-manager or scmproj?

Could it be an optional part of the mapping? I imagine mapping options 
aren't to be encouraged, since independent bzr branches created from the 
same svn branch with different mapping options would not be interoperable.

The only reason I raise it is that nested trees have remained in the 
pipeline for several years now, and this is probably an adoption blocker 
for many users who make use of Subversion externals. Having bzr co 
svn_branch just work, even when there are externals, would be a major 
bonus, and perhaps you'll be able to reuse most of the implementation 
when you make it work with nested trees...

Tom