[RFC] remote bookmark tracking

[David Soria Parra]

On 2011-02-03, Alexander Solovyov <alexander at solovyov.net> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I want to bring to discussing one thing which bothers me a lot lately. We are
> using bookmarks a lot for our work and the way they work is sometimes just
> undesirable.
>

Hi Alex,

thanks for comming up with this topic. I think adding remote tracking
bookmarks is a good idea.

For the record:I suiggested using remote/ as a prefix for remote tracking
bookmarks.  This is simlar to git's remote branch model. When it comes
to bookmarks I like to stay as close as possible to git's behaviour,
as long as it make sense. As remote/ is just a naming convention an
advanced user can overwrite remote bookmarks with an -f flag is needed
(if something went wrong or so).

The downside of this approach is clear: it is a BC break if we later
move this feature into core and forbid names starting with remote/.
An alternatve approach would be to add a 'r'(remote) flag in a separate
file.

Please do not add a third field to the bookmarks file. The
current codebase will fail to read a bookmarks field with a third
parameter. Creating a bookmarks file with a new version that adds a third
field and then using an old version again (after an rsync or whatever)
will not work.

I think the general idea is good but I don't think we can integrate this
into core yet.  I suggest to start with a 'bookmarks-remote' extension
that can implements it.  Once people start using it and extension is a
little bit more refined we can think about moving it into core.

Thanks David