bzr clone should be able to clone a repo, not just be an alias to branch

[John Carr]

Rightly or wrongly, Git users like to be to able get the full history for their project, including all branches. While i'm not entirely in favour of it myself, it is nice to be able to get all the branches im interested in at once (and the extra ones dont cost me that much).

bzr-svn and bzr-git both have $vcs-import commands. These could possibly just happen on clone.

This might be related to the ColocatedBranches spec.

[Ian Clatworthy (ian-clatworthy)]

I agree that 'bzr clone' ought to be able to clone a repository, not just a branch. More generally, I'd like us to think hard about "branch groups" and support duplicating those via the clone command. In Bazaar, we can support layouts like:

  project/
    release-X/
      X.trunk/
      X.foo/
   release-Y/
     Y.trunk/
     Y.bar/

where project/ is a shared repository, release.*/ are plain directories and [XY].* are bzr branches. I want to be able to say stuff like:

* get me all the Python-2.6 branches
* get me all the "QA" branches

Furthermore, I think clone ought to respect the source structure, i.e. if I "bzr clone Y.bar", it ought to create a directory called project/release-Y/Y.bar and make project a shared repository. (If I just want a branch, I can use the existing branch command: clone will no longer just be an alias for branch under this proposal.) Projects frequently have groups of branches and users can benefit by following a consistent structure based on these groups.

Done right, a generalised clone command like this would make using Bazaar the "right" way easier.

[methane (songofacandy)]

Good point.
I think cloning repo should copy repository without rebuilding. (both standalone repo and shared repo).
This makes clone fast like hg and git.

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

see the discussions about colocated branches and ui improvements