wishlist: bzr pull --overwrite-tags

Sounds reasonable to me.

This bug is affecting the tool from the Go language that downloads remote packages from Bazaar branches. Go uses tags as a way to relate a specific revision in the branch to a given version of the compiler suite, so every once in a while such tags have to be updated to point to a new version of the branch's code. Then, once one says something like "go get -u launchpad.net/mgo", the tool will attempt to update the local version of the package, but since tags are often updated, it currently has to use --overwrite as well, which is not great.

Having a --overwrite-tags flag is exactly what would be needed in that case.

This shouldn't actually be a lot of additional work to finish, so let's JFDI.

Just to be clear, push has the same issue as well. Is the intention to add the flag on both push and pull?

On 1 February 2012 06:45, Gustavo Niemeyer <email address hidden> wrote:

> Just to be clear, push has the same issue as well. Is the intention to
> add the flag on both push and pull?
>

I would think so.

--
Martin

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 09:49:17PM -0000, Martin Pool wrote:
> On 1 February 2012 06:45, Gustavo Niemeyer <email address hidden> wrote:
>
> > Just to be clear, push has the same issue as well. Is the intention to
> > add the flag on both push and pull?
> I would think so.
Yeah. It's going to require a slight API change, so I'm looking at
landing it before beta 6 this Thursday.

Cheers,

Jelmer

On 01/31/2012 08:45 PM, Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:
> Just to be clear, push has the same issue as well. Is the intention to
> add the flag on both push and pull?
Yes. They're pretty similar in the codebase. My existing branch already
does this for both push and pull.

Is this being dropped from 2.5?

Yes, it didn't make it into 2.5.0 because of concerns about API changes so late in the cycle. See https://code.launchpad.net/~jelmer/bzr/overwrite-tags/+merge/91277 for the discussion.

Sorry for not letting you know about this earlier; after the discussion on the merge proposal I got distracted by other things and then forgot about it.

There are still some things we can do, such as providing a plugin with a command that implements this behaviour. Would that help, or are there perhaps other things we can do?