Re: [Zero-install-devel] Retrieval method: repository: git, svn, bazaar, ...

[Tim C. <ti...@gf...>]

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 6:52 AM, Tim Diels <lim...@gm...> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I wanted to get the latest development version from doit, which is located
> on a bazaar repository. So I'd like to add a new retrieval method to
> checkout the latest version from the repository. Using the doit feed as an
> example of what it would look like (see below).
>
> I'm not sure about the naming, href isn't quite right in the case of bazaar,
> perhaps uri is more correct, or location/path. Repository seems alright,
> analog to archive.

You're going to have trouble creating the manifest for a
constantly-changing HEAD though...

It could work for a branch (ie. <repository type="bazaar"
href="lp:doit" tag="0.1.2" />
But you can probably get an archive easily enough from a tagged
version already, so there may not be much point enabling a bzr
checkout of that. I guess if you could do:

<repository type="bazaar" ref="abc123" />

you could create a release from any arbitrary commit ID, but I'm not
sure how often that would (or should) be used.

And in terms of 0install dependencies, it could be frustrating if you
had to have bzr, git, hg, mtn, svn all installed to reliably launch
0install feeds. The existing extraction methods mostly rely on
relatively small / commonly installed libraries, whereas a VCS is
neither of those.

Cheers,
 - Tim C