.. -*- mode: indented-text; compile-command: "make -C doc" -*- ******************* Things to do in bzr ******************* See also various low-level TODOs in the source code. Try looking in the list archive or on gmane.org for previous discussion of these issues. These are classified by approximate size: an hour or less, a day or less, and several days or more. Small things ------------ * Fix tests so that import errors caused by modules don't produce false reports that the tests themselves don't exist. * Fix tests so that one test failure doesn't prevent other tests from running * print a message at the end of running the tests telling them that the test log and output exists but can be removed * tests for running the commit editor, and fix problem of not passing in multiple arguments * Merging add of a new file clashing with an existing file doesn't work; add gets an error that it's already versioned and the merge aborts. * Merge should ignore the destination's working directory, otherwise we get an error about the statcache when pulling from a remote branch. * Add of a file that was present in the base revision should put back the previous file-id. * Not sure I'm happy with needing to pass a root id to EmptyTree; comparing anything against an EmptyTree with no root should have the same effect(?) * Handle diff of files which do not have a trailing newline; probably requires patching difflib to get it exactly right, or otherwise calling out to GNU diff. * Should be able to copy files between branches to preserve their file-id (and perhaps eventually parentage.) * -r option should take a revision-id as well as a revno. * ``bzr info`` should count only people with distinct email addresses as different committers. (Or perhaps only distinct userids?) * On Windows, command-line arguments should be `glob-expanded`__, because the shell doesn't do this. However, there are probably some commands where this shouldn't be done, such as 'bzr ignore', because we want to accept globs. * ``bzr ignore`` command that just adds a line to the ``.bzrignore`` file and makes it versioned. Fix this to break symlinks. * Any useful sanity checks in 'bzr ignore'? Perhaps give a warning if they try to add a single file which is already versioned, or if they add a pattern which already exists, or if it looks like they gave an unquoted glob. __ http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2001-April/037847.html * Separate read and write version checks? * ``bzr status DIR`` should give status on all files under that directory. * ``bzr log DIR`` should give changes to any files within DIR; at the moment it only lists things which modify the specific named file (and not its contents) * ``bzr inventory -r REV`` and perhaps unify this with ``bzr ls``, giving options to display ids, types, etc. * RemoteBranch could maintain a cache either in memory or on disk. We know more than an external cache might about which files are immutable and which can vary. On the other hand, it's much simpler to just use an external proxy cache. Perhaps ~/.bzr/http-cache. Baz has a fairly simple cache under ~/.arch-cache, containing revision information encoded almost as a bunch of archives. Perhaps we could simply store full paths. * Maybe also store directories in the statcache so that we can quickly identify that they still exist. * Diff should show timestamps; for files from the working directory we can use the file itself; for files from a revision we should use the commit time of the revision. * Perhaps split command infrastructure from the actual command definitions. * Cleaner support for negative boolean options like --no-recurse. * Statcache should possibly map all file paths to / separators * quotefn doubles all backslashes on Windows; this is probably not the best thing to do. What would be a better way to safely represent filenames? Perhaps we could doublequote things containing spaces, on the principle that filenames containing quotes are unlikely? Nice for humans; less good for machine parsing. * Patches should probably use only forward slashes, even on Windows, otherwise Unix patch can't apply them. (?) * Branch.update_revisions() inefficiently fetches revisions from the remote server twice; once to find out what text and inventory they need and then again to actually get the thing. This is a bit inefficient. One complicating factor here is that we don't really want to have revisions present in the revision-store until all their constituent parts are also stored. The basic problem is that RemoteBranch.get_revision() and similar methods return object, but what we really want is the raw XML, which can be popped into our own store. That needs to be refactored. * Guard against repeatedly merging any particular patch. * More options for diff: - diff two revisions of the same tree - diff two different branches, optionally at different revisions - diff a particular file in another tree against the corresponding version in this tree (which should be the default if the second parameter is a tree root) - diff everything under a particular directory, in any of the above ways - diff two files inside the same tree, even if they have different ids - and, of course, tests for all this * Reproducible performance benchmark to measure whether performance is getting better or worse. * ``bzr log -m foo`` should perhaps error if nothing matches? * ``bzr diff -r 30 -r 40 foo.c`` or ``bzr diff -r30..40 foo.c`` If diffing between two branches then we probably want two -r options, since the revisions don't form a range that can be evaluated on either one. * bzr diff shouldn't diff binary files * setup.py install when run from a bzr tree should freeze the tree revision-id into the installed bzr. * bzr script should trap ImportError and perhaps give a better error message? * revert after a merge should possibly remove all the BASE/THIS/OTHER files to get you back to where you were. * files that are added and then deleted are still reported as added * stores should raise KeyError, not IndexError * merging from a remote branch seems to sometimes raise errors not present locally * should be possible to give a related branch when pulling from a remote branch to make things faster * sometimes gives "conflicting add" even when the contents are in fact the same??? * BZRDIR should be in branch.py not __init__.py. Medium things ------------- * merge should add all revision and inventory XML to the local store. * check should give a warning for revisions that are named in the chain but not actually present in the store. * remove anything outside of the branch implementation that directly accesses the stores. * More efficient diff of only selected files. We should be able to just get the id for the selected files, look up their location and diff just those files. No need to traverse the entire inventories. * Fix up Inventory objects to represent root object as an entry. * Don't convert entire entry from ElementTree to an object when it is read in, but rather wait until the program actually wants to know about that node. * Extract changes from one revision to the next to a text form suitable for transmission over email. * More test cases. - ``missing`` command - Selected-file commit - Impossible selected-file commit: adding things in non-versioned directories, crossing renames, etc. * Write a reproducible benchmark, perhaps importing various kernel versions. * Directly import diffs! It seems a bit redundant to need to rescan the directory to work out what files diff added/deleted/changed when all the information is there in the diff in the first place. Getting the exact behaviour for added/deleted subdirectories etc might be hard. At the very least we could run diffstat over the diff, or perhaps read the status output from patch. Just knowing which files might be modified would be enough to guide the add and commit. Given this we might be able to import patches at 1/second or better. * revfile compression. * Split inventory into per-directory files? * Fix ignore file parsing: - fnmatch is not the same as unix patterns - perhaps add extended globs from rsh/rsync - perhaps a pattern that matches only directories or non-directories * Consider using Python logging library as well as/instead of bzrlib.trace. * Commands should give some progress indication by default. - But quieten this with ``--silent``. * Change to using gettext message localization. * Make a clearer separation between internal and external bzrlib interfaces. Make internal interfaces use protected names. Write at least some documentation for those APIs, probably as docstrings. Consider using ZopeInterface definitions for the external interface; I think these are already used in PyBaz. They allow automatic checking of the interface but may be unfamiliar to general Python developers, so I'm not really keen. * Commands to dump out all command help into a manpage or HTML file or whatever. * Handle symlinks in the working directory; at the very least it should be possible for them to be present and ignored/unknown without causing assertion failures. Eventually symlinks should be versioned. * Allow init in a subdirectory to create a nested repository, but only if the subdirectory is not already versioned. Perhaps also require a ``--nested`` to protect against confusion. * Branch names? * More test framework: - Class that describes the state of a working tree so we can just assert it's equal. * Try using XSLT to add some formatting to REST-generated HTML. Or maybe write a small Python program that specifies a header and foot for the pages and calls into the docutils libraries. * --format=xml for log, status and other commands. * Attempting to explicitly add a file that's already added should give a warning; however there should be no warning for directories (since we scan for new children) or files encountered in a directory that's being scanned. * Better handling of possible collisions on case-losing filesystems; make sure a single file does not get added twice under different names. * Clean up XML inventory: - Use nesting rather than parent_id pointers. - Hold the ElementTree in memory in the Inventory object and work directly on that, rather than converting into Python objects every time it is read in. Probably still expose it through some kind of object interface though, but perhaps that should just be a proxy for the elements. - Less special cases for the root directory. * Perhaps inventories should remember the revision in which each file was last changed, as well as its current state? This is a bit redundant but might often be interested to know. * stat cache should perhaps only stat files as necessary, rather than doing them all up-front. On the other hand, that disallows the optimization of stating them in inode order. * It'd be nice to pipeline multiple HTTP requests. Often we can predict what will be wanted in future: all revisions, or all texts in a particular revision, etc. urlgrabber's docs say they are working on batched downloads; we could perhaps ride on that or just create a background thread (ew). * Paranoid mode where we never trust SHA-1 matches. * --dry-run mode for commit? (Or maybe just run with check-command=false?) * Generally, be a bit more verbose unless --silent is specified. * Function that finds all changes to files under a given directory; perhaps log should use this if a directory is given. * XML attributes might have trouble with filenames containing \n and \r. Do we really want to support this? I think perhaps not. * Unify smart_add and plain Branch.add(); perhaps smart_add should just build a list of files to add and pass that to the regular add function. * Function to list a directory, saying in which revision each file was last modified. Useful for web and GUI interfaces, and slow to compute one file at a time. This will be done when we track file texts by referring to the version that created them. * Check locking is correct during merge-related operations. * Perhaps attempts to get locks should timeout after some period of time, or at least display a progress message. * Don't pass around command classes but rather pass objects. This'd make it cleaner to construct objects wrapping external commands. * Track all merged-in revisions in a versioned add-only metafile. * ``uncommit`` command that removes a revision from the end of the revision-history; just doing this is enough to remove the commit, and a new commit will automatically be made against the predecessor. This can be repeated. It only makes sense to delete from the tail of history. This has been implemented, but it does not remove the texts from the store. Large things ------------ * Generate annotations from current file relative to previous annotations. - Is it necessary to store any kind of annotation where data was deleted? * Update revfile_ format and make it active: - Texts should be identified by something keyed on the revision, not an individual text-id. This is much more useful for annotate I think; we want to map back to the revision that last changed it. - Access revfile revisions through the Tree/Store classes. - Check them from check commands. - Store annotations. .. _revfile: revfile.html * Hooks for pre-commit, post-commit, etc. Consider the security implications; probably should not enable hooks for remotely-fetched branches by default. * Pre-commit check. If this hook is defined, it needs to be handled specially: create a temporary directory containing the tree as it will be after the commit. This means excluding any ignored/unknown files, and respecting selective commits. Run the pre-commit check (e.g. compile and run test suite) in there. Possibly this should be done by splitting the commit function into several parts (under a single interface). It is already rather large. Decomposition: - find tree modifications and prepare in-memory inventory - export that inventory to a temporary directory - run the test in that temporary directory - if that succeeded, continue to actually finish the commit What should be done with the text of modified files while this is underway? I don't think we want to count on holding them in memory and we can't trust the working files to stay in one place so I suppose we need to move them into the text store, or otherwise into a temporary directory. If the commit does not actually complete, we would rather the content was not left behind in the stores. * Web interface * GUI (maybe in Python GTK+?) * C library interface * Expansion of $Id$ keywords within working files. Perhaps do this in exports first as a simpler case because then we don't need to deal with removing the tags on the way back in. * ``bzr find``