Recreate "Download a Directory" feature

[Onno Benschop]

I was asked by Michael Hudson to lodge this report. In Bug #207417 I reported that the download of a directory caused a 500 Internal Server Error. (This bug is now "fixed".)

The feature I was attempting to use was the ability to download a directory from bazaar. In my case I was attempting to download the Server Guide so I could spell check it and send a patch to the documentation team. The directory contains 450kb of XML files, but using bzr requires the download of many megabytes - I stopped at around 11Mb IIRC.

The download directory web-link - which was recently removed and as a by-product closed the bug I reported - no longer exists.

It is entirely possible that the functionality I need is available using bzr, but failing that, enabling the download link for a directory would be a good thing.

[Martin Albisetti (beuno)]

Tightly related to bug #246764

We should patch bzrlib to allow exporting a subtree:

02:26 < lifeless> beuno: bzrlib.export.export with a tree object
02:26 < lifeless> beuno: all it needs is a tree decorator that gives you 'doc' as the root rather than '/', for instance
02:28 < beuno> ok, so it would make sense to try and get a patch into bzr, and work on top of that
02:28 < lifeless> we could also tweak the exporter protocol to accept a limit parameter
02:28 < lifeless> rather than using a decorated tree; I don't have an opinion about which is better

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

Patch for bzr adding the needed facility:
 http://bundlebuggy.aaronbentley.com/project/bzr/request/%3C1218173303.4514.131.camel%40lifeless-64%3E

[Display Name (user340562791542-deactivatedaccount)]

In the web ui for hg, you can download the latest revision as a zip file, for example: http://www.sheep.art.pl/devel/mandarin/archive/tip.zip.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

Renato, loggerhead can already export individual revisions as zips/tarballs; this bug is for doing it for subdirectories.

[lborgman (lennart-borgman)]

Robert, do you mean that there is a way to do the export now in Launchpad. I can not find it. Can you perhaps point to where I can do this (for example in the nXhtml project that I maintain).