option to protect a branch against commits/changes

[Martin Pool]

When a release branch's release is made, it would be nice to have an option which says "I think this branch is finished, don't allow more commits or changes". This should disable modification of the history either through new commits or push/pull. It should be possible to turn the option off or to override it for a particular operation.

Perhaps something like 'bzr set branch protected'.

This is a bit like the --fix option in Arch and Baz. The arch feature modified the user-visible revision ids and could only be fired once per branch. I don't think either of those are necessary.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

See also bug 73752, which asks for a similar option to prevent switches only.

[Dan Watkins (oddbloke)]

Could this be done with a pre-commit hook that stats a given file and just cancels the commit if it exists?

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

Well, we have a switch to prevent changing the mainline (something like append_only=True).

I would probably go for a simple config item. I believe you could do it in a plugin, especially now that we have a hook for whenever the revision_id of a branch changes. (Unless that cannot prevent the change, and only reports that it *does* change.) We also have a push and pull hook that could probably handle some of it (you also need a commit hook, etc)