[Gnu-arch-users] Bazaar 1.3 preview

[Robert Collins]

Baz 1.3 is shaping up for release now. There hasn't been much noise
during this cycle - we've been head down and tail up hacking on the
ArchiveRegistration and SigningRules draft specifications put up on the
wiki last month.

The upshot of this is that one of the big long term UI goals of bazaar
has landed in the mainline as of yesterday. This eliminates the use of
'registered names' throughout the baz codebase, except where they are
required to provide a smooth upgrade path. You can no longer trigger
esoteric bugs by doing a 'library-add' of 'foo-SOURCE/c--b--v' - the
code will do the right thing. A corollary to this is that urls are
directly supported by the user interface for most commands. I.e.
archive-fixup will accept the url of an archive. A side effect of this
is that 'write-through' mirrors are now possible. Just register the
master archive with a lower priority than your local mirror, and baz
will get from the local mirror but commit to master.

One of the enablers for this is the elimination of the signing scripts
that depended on registered names (and were thus quite fragile and
inflexible). We've implemented in-baz signature verification using a new
dependency - libgpgme - which allows baz direct control over gpg (or
s/mime if someone wants to send in a patch) signature verification. 

This code is backwards compatible code. The current setup of baz on
your machines will operate as-is (and if it doesn't, its a bug, not a
feature).

A number of commands that needed 
$baz command -A archive something-here
now operate with 
$baz command archive/something-here

If you have problems, your old configuration files are stored in
~/.arch-params/upgraded-by-baz-1.3 and can be restored to get back your
previous config.

Thats it. You can now use urls in most commands, and mirroring and
publishing of archives should have become a lot simpler.

Archives are now registered in ~/.arch-params/archives/$OFFICIAL_NAME.
The ~/.arch-params/=locations directory is deprecated and baz plans to
remove support for it (other than upgrades) in baz 1.4. The new system
allows us to remove the -SOURCE and -MIRROR concepts from baz by
recording multiple archive locations under the official name. One
immediately visible benefit is that archive-mirror will now do the right
thing with signed archives automatically.

What do you need to do if you try this code ?
Nothing immediately - the =locations registry will still be used.

If you want to upgrade your config automatically, run baz upgrade.
$ baz upgrade --leave-old-config will preserve the old config files.
This is not recommended, as you will then have two sets of diverging
configurations.
$ baz upgrade --move-old-config will move the =locations registry files
it upgrades into ~/.arch-params/upgraded-by-baz-1.3. This is
recommended, but means that tla, and older versions of baz, will no
longer know about your archives. (You can just move the files back if
you need to downgrade).

When baz upgrade looks at signing and checking scripts, it makes a best
effort attempt to extract information from them, if it fails it emits a
warning - you should review the SigningRules and ArchiveRegistration
pages and tell baz what policy you actually want.

Cheers,
Rob

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