merge requests should work with bundles or merge directives

[Selene ToyKeeper]

Merge requests currently require a branch hosted on launchpad, but this can be wasteful. It should also let the user attach a bzr bundle or merge directive, instead of a full branch.

The use case for this is ... say someone wants to fix a fairly small bug in a project. So, they branch off project/trunk, fix the bug, and publish their own fixed branch to propose for merging. Assume the fix is a 10KB diff, and the project's full revision history is 50MB. The whole-branch approach requires orders of magnitude more space and uploading time than a bzr bundle would need. It's O(project history) instead of O(patch), which can be expensive for large or old projects.

[Tim Penhey (thumper)]

We are planning to have something like this, but we are putting the infrastructure in place. The stacked branch implementation will give us O(patch) storage costs. We are also considering allowing the emailing of merge directives to Launchpad and a branch will be created, merge proposal registered and potentially other meta-data set based on email content.

Stay tuned :-)

[Paul Hummer (rockstar)]

Aaron has at least partial functionality for doing a bzr send for merge proposals.

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

Please don't announce this. It's not ready for prime time, and I'm not currently working on it.

[Björn Tillenius (bjornt)]

I added the launchpad-adoption-blocker tag, since I think it's important being able to add a merge proposal without using the web UI. I'm only interested in the case where there is a branch hosted on Launchpad already, and I want to be able to add a merge proposal for it, either via e-mail or via the API.

[Paul Hummer (rockstar)]

And let me add "Woot!"